The highlight of the set was an extended exploration of Tea for Two.
He played long articulate runs with a delicate interweaving counterpoint from Green and Brown. It made you want to hear the piece again.īarry Harris is one of the last greats of that Detroit jazz scene – Kirk Lightsey, eight years younger than Harris, is another – and he is enjoying a fruitful autumn to his career. “That was an oldie but with some very strange chords,” declared Harris, demonstrating them on the piano. After Green took a graceful solo the leader guided the tune to its conclusion. Steve Brown was all kick drums and brushes, there was plummy strumming from Dave Green, and then suddenly we were into a beautiful, lingering rendition of Heart and Soul. A ghostly tinkling of the keys emerged from the rapt silence before flowing and flowering into a complex skein of chords.
You’ve never heard a restaurant fall silent so quickly as when Harris settled at his piano and began to play.
Supported by the crack duo-chrome British team of Dave Green on bass and Steve Brown on drums, he had been playing for five nights at Pizza Express and was comfortable and pleased to be here. “Is this the shirt with the hole in it?” he wondered, as he casually played some striptease music to accompany himself.
The air conditioning was on full blast at Soho’s Pizza Express but it was still hot under the lights of the bandstand and Harris decided to shuck off his jacket. The pianist completed his annual London residency last night in the midst of a very un-English heat wave. But with one crucial difference: Harris, still spry and adroit at 83, remains among us. That encounter led me to seek out Japanese reissues of his classic Riverside trio albums like At the Jazz Workshop (1960) and Preminado (1961), to track down rarities like his long forgotten 1975 duet album Don’t Look Back with vocalist David Allen on the Xanadu label - Barry Harris can accompany a singer as well as he does everything else in the jazz universe.įor decades Harris has remained up there in my jazz pantheon, with the likes of Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson.
The haunting and hypnotic beauty of those tunes owed a great deal to the sparse perfection of the piano playing by one Barry Harris, another stalwart of the thriving Detroit bebop scene. My first ever experience of a genuine jazz classic - or, at least one that wasn’t Kind of Blue– was the 1961 Moodsville album Eastern Sounds by Detroit tenor man Yusef Lateef, with its two marvellous, delicate love themes (from Spartacus and The Robe). (Pizza Express, Dean Street, July 16th 2013.