BARRY HARRIS
Solo Piano Concert
PROFESSOR BEBOP
Sunday, 10/28/07, 7:30 pm
Nelson Music Room
$20 • $5*
In the last of three Following Monk solo piano concerts in the Nelson Music Room, the man known as “Professor Bebop” responds musically to his relationship with Monk. Harris struck up a unique and profound friendship with Monk in the master’s final, reclusive years and became perhaps the most important living exponent of Monk’s personal and musical legacy.
Harris was born in Detroit and has played piano since he was four, developing from Midwestern child prodigy to fixture of the New York jazz scene. He’s now one of the living masters of the jazz piano, a virtuoso in the mold of Bud Powell and Monk and heir to the swinging but measured style of bop.
The Village Voice calls Harris “the key conservator of bebop music,” and the man who’s played with Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, and Max Roach (among many others) remains one of the most sensitive interpreters of his former scene-mate’s particular, arrhythmic tempos.
So while Harris’s style is influenced by jazz modernists like Powell, Art Tatum, and Monk, it’s also affected by more classical sources. But, Harris specifies, “if Bach or Chopin were alive today, honey, they would be playing in the corner bar."
Barry Harris on Monk:
“Well, you know that Monk was an individual. Monk was a creature who must have said one day, ‘I’m not going to play like anyone else.’ And so he commenced to do it and his solos weren’t like anybody else and his songs weren’t like anybody else. […] Monk was an individual.”
Barry Harris on the web:
Master Class with Barry Harris, jazz piano
Monday, 10/29/07, 4 pm, Baldwin Auditorium
Free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact Duke's Department of Music at (919) 660-3300 .
Funded, in part, by the Duke Department of Music.