Barry Harris

Barry Harris (born December 15, 1929, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died December 8, 2021, North Bergen, New Jersey) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator who, as a musician, became known for his virtuosity, marked by complex chord structures and speed of play. An exponent of the bebop style that became popular after World War II, he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Yusuf Lateef, Coleman Hawkins, Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Stitt, among many other musicians. Thelonious Monk, a close friend, and Charlie Parker are considered to be among Harris’s chief influences.

Harris began piano lessons at age four, under his mother’s tutelage. He studied classical music throughout his youth until coming under the influence of Parker, whom he first heard in Detroit in the late 1940s. Harris’s family home became a salon for jazz musicians, his mother encouraging his newfound interest. He worked as a sideman, session player, and lead player in Detroit in the 1950s, when he played with such stars as Davis, Parker, and Sarah Vaughan.

In 1960 Harris moved to New York, where he played regularly with Adderley and Hawkins. There Pannonica de Koenigswarter—the British scion of the Rothschild dynasty and patroness of the New York jazz scene, which dubbed her the “Jazz Baroness”—befriended Harris and introduced him to many luminaries, including pianist Monk. Harris lived with Monk at de Koenigswarter’s house in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in the 1970s. In 1982 Harris founded Manhattan’s Jazz Cultural Theatre, a performance venue featuring famed jazz musicians as well as jam sessions and music classes for musicians young and old; he ran it until it closed in 1987. Harris also became renowned as an educator, teaching courses in jazz theory, piano, and voice at several schools and institutions in the New York area and delivering master classes and lectures throughout the world.