Another jazz music giant has left us: Barry Harris

A legend of jazz. How else can you describe Barry Harris? He would have turned 92 next December 15 and spent 87 years of his life at the keyboard. When Harris was just a teenager,  the jazz world around him changed radically: Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk brought the piano into the Copernican revolution of Bebop which, under the leadership of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, was consigning the “Swing Era” to the archives. It was the birth of modern jazz.

As well as playing with Parker and Gillespie, in the course of his long and illustrious career, Harris has also played and recorded with Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Sony Stitt, Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon, Sarah Vaughan, Illinois Jacquet, and many, many more. The history of modern jazz has passed next to the piano of Barry Harris.