Barry Harris, a jazz pianist who embodied the spirit of bebop after learning the intricate style of music from its creators and then became a much-admired performer and teacher, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. He was 91.
Mr. Harris took his first lessons at 4 from his mother, a church pianist, then became immersed in the fertile musical world of Detroit, which produced dozens of major jazz figures. One of his best friends in high school was a fellow pianist who became famous as the founder of the Motown record label: Berry Gordy.
In his teens, Mr. Harris became a devotee of bebop, the inventive jazz style of the 1940s that originated with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Mr. Harris never forgot the first time he heard Parker in person, accompanied by a string section at a roller skating rink in Detroit.
“It was the greatest experience you could ever want to have in your life,” he said in 2005. “You feel a chill just go through you starting at your feet, go through your whole body.”
Mr. Harris became a dedicated student of bebop, eventually developing a comprehensive theory of chord structures and improvisational choices, which he distilled into a fleet, incandescent piano style marked by flashing, quicksilver passages that were never rushed.
“Barry was an extraordinarily expressive pianist, a master of the bebop language, and one of the last musicians on the planet who absorbed that information directly from the architects of bebop at mid-century,” critic Mark Stryker, the author of the 2019 book “Jazz From Detroit,” said in email.
For the first decade of his career, Mr. Harris stayed in Detroit, where he accompanied countless musicians appearing in the city’s jazz clubs, including Parker, trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist Lester Young. His mother’s apartment became a busy hub of jazz, as musicians dropped by for jam sessions or informal lessons with Mr. Harris.
“He was a critical reason why Detroit became a jazz powerhouse in the 1950s,” Stryker said. “A startling number of soon-to-be-influential jazz musicians came up under his wing in Detroit, among them Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Paul Chambers, Yusef Lateef, Joe Henderson, Doug Watkins, Pepper Adams and Charles McPherson. Even the great Motown bassist James Jamerson was a Harris student in Detroit.”
In 1956, Mr. Harris spent several months touring with drummer Max Roach and saxophonist Sonny Rollins, but he remained rooted in Detroit until 1960, when he moved to New York to join a band led by the popular alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley.
Mr. Harris appeared on albums with Adderley and dozens of other musicians, including saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Hank Mobley. He was a key contributor to trumpeter Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” which became a jazz hit in 1964. Mr. Harris recorded the first of more than two dozen albums as a leader in 1958, adhering mostly to a bebop-and-ballads style.
“Harris is one of the very few pianists who never allow the fingers to fill in when the mind falters,” critic Dan Morgenstern wrote in 1970, reviewing one of Mr. Harris’s most acclaimed recordings, “Magnificent!” “There are no clichéd runs in his book.”
His piano style reflected the coruscating romanticism of Art Tatum, the inventive precision of Powell and the spiky individuality of Monk — who later became Mr. Harris’s longtime housemate.
“The piano is a funny thing,” Mr. Harris said in 1999. “You’ve got to sort of glide over it. You have to skate over it.”
He defined a theory of jazz piano and improvisation revolving around chord structures and improvisational choices made in split-second intervals. Perhaps a deeper lesson that Mr. Harris sought to impart was the idea that being a true jazz musician comes out of a deep, abiding commitment to the music, heightened by the joy and surprise found in an unexpected chord or rhythmic twist.
He began teaching in Detroit, then continued in New York, accepting students at all levels of ability. From 1982 to 1987, he presided over the Jazz Cultural Theater in Manhattan, providing training and rehearsal space for musicians. He had thousands of students through the years.
“I’m just doing what all older musicians should be doing,” he told the New York Times in 1994.
Whenever he had a concert — whether in the United States, Canada, Europe or Japan — Mr. Harris often stayed for a few days to teach master classes. He could be alternately gruff, opinionated, impatient and endearing. He had an annual residency at Royal Conservatory in Amsterdam, drawing scores of students to sessions that lasted from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
“The first thing you are is a rhythm instrument,” he told his proteges. “This whole world is built on rhythm.”
Speaking the lingo he learned while growing up in jazz, he would say: “Cats, and this could be cats of any age, play all kinds of patterns but they don’t understand that it takes silence, too. You have to pause all the time, like in a conversation. That silence is not empty space. It’s one of the necessary parts.”
He considered bebop America’s highest form of musical expression, with Parker, Powell and Gillespie its exalted geniuses.
“I guess I’m really what you would call an inveterate bebopper,” he said. “Forever and a day.”
Barry Doyle Harris was born Dec. 15, 1929, in Detroit. His father, who left the family when Mr. Harris was young, was a mechanic and gas station attendant. His mother was a church pianist.
He grew up in a home with few luxuries other than music. While concentrating on the piano, Mr. Harris also played the bass violin in his school’s orchestra. He became a full-time musician soon after high school and was part of an environment that produced numerous other major figures in jazz, including guitarist Kenny Burrell, pianist Tommy Flanagan, drummer Elvin Jones and singers Sheila Jordan and Betty Carter.
In 1953, Mr. Harris married Christine Brown, who remained in Detroit after he settled in New York. They were married until her death in 2017. Survivors include their daughter, Carol Geyer of Detroit.
In New York, Mr. Harris befriended the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who was a lover of jazz and an heir of the Rothschild fortune. One of Monk’s best-known tunes, “Pannonica,” is named after her. In 1963, Mr. Harris began living in the baroness’s home in Weehawken, N.J., which was also inhabited by as many as 100 cats. He was joined a few years later by Monk, who lived there until his death in 1982.
The house contained two pianos, set up next to each other, where Monk and Mr. Harris sometimes spent hours practicing together. The baroness died in 1988, but in her will she stipulated that Mr. Harris could stay in the house until his death.
Somewhat slowed by a stroke in 1993, Mr. Harris soon returned to form and continued to perform all over the world until the coronavirus pandemic shut down clubs and concert halls in 2020. His November performance in Queens was one of his first public appearances in almost two years.
He continued to lead classes on Zoom for about 100 international students until two weeks before his death.
Among his many honors, he was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1989. All the while he was playing jazz and teaching, Mr. Harris continued to take lessons himself, studying with classical pianist Sophia Rosoff until she died in 2017.
“You have to enjoy playing,” Mr. Harris said in 1960. “The old-timers did, and that’s one reason why there is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can’t do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.”
