After about 65 years of being a jazz pianist, Barry Harris can still remember how he made his start as both a musician and a teacher ““ one who has recorded numerous albums as a solo player and as a collaborator with more musicians than he can remember.
“My teaching started when I was about 15 years old because I knew a little more than the other musicians. They knew I was always sitting at the piano trying to play, so they all came to my house,” Harris said.
Harris, a Detroit native who has taught all over the world, will be performing tomorrow night at the Lenart Auditorium in Fowler Museum in an event presented by Friends of Jazz at UCLA. He will play alongside jazz drummer Roy McCurdy and jazz bassist Chuck Berghofer.
While Harris has taught at UCLA before, it will be his first time performing on campus. Having visited countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, Spain, Portugal, England, France, Austria and Germany, Harris has had a great deal of experience performing for and teaching a wide variety of people.
“I was in Rome in March, and I had about 100 students from about 13 countries, and that doesn’t happen too often anywhere in the world,” said Harris, who loves the opportunities he has to travel.
Ethnomusicology Professor Tamir Hendelman has benefited from workshops Harris used to have at a performance space called the World Stage in Los Angeles.
“It was great to see him coax the emotion out of the vocalists and get them to really play with interpreting the melody and get the pianists to work with the vocalists, and how to accompany them in a more sensitive way,” said Hendelman, a jazz piano instructor who attended the workshops at around 18-20 years of age.
Hendelman said that Harris had inspired him in the way that he teaches during his own workshops. He even remembers the song Harris used in the workshop, which was “Where Do You Start?” by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
“It was very inviting. You could really see his warm and intelligent way with students and just his whole experience, his kind of encyclopedic knowledge of jazz song and jazz piano. It was very beautiful,” Hendelman said.
While Harris will be unable to provide similar workshops during his visit to UCLA, his performance on campus has been many months in the making.
After encountering conflicts for a proposed November appearance, Friends of Jazz was able to fly the musician out for a summer performance night, according to Sonya Gavin, secretary of Friends of Jazz.
While Harris only plays one instrument, he can teach people to improvise despite the type of instrument they play. He has worked with thousands of musicians to improve their technique so that they may play something new at any given moment.
“You have to improvise on the spur of the moment. You cannot sit around, make up something, correct it and make it sound good. You have to do it right at the moment,” Harris said.
Along with teaching thousands of musicians, Harris has played with many of them as well. While Harris has not played with all of the musicians accompanying him tomorrow night, he says that playing shows with new people is not uncommon for him or many other musicians.
“That’s the way jazz is. We go to different places. We play with different people,” Harris said.
He will also be performing for a new audience, and after all of his years of playing across the globe, Harris is ready to make believers out of his UCLA audience.
“I think the whole thing is to thrill the audience, to make the audience know that they’ve been some place,” Harris said.
With 65 years of experience under his belt, Harris does not plan on stopping anytime soon. He will continue teaching and performing jazz music as long as he can.
“It has really been my life ““ all my life. You know, it’s like you fall in love with a thing and you stay there all of your life,” Harris said.