Category Archives: Obituaries

Wayne Shorter, 1933–2023

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“Jazz shouldn’t have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be required to sound like jazz. For me, the word ‘jazz’ means ‘I dare you.'”
—Wayne Shorter

Left to right: Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Wayne ShorterJoe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Wayne Shorter, June 1984. I'm sure they're all having a good time jamming somewhere in the beyond. Photo posted on Chick Corea's Facebook page several months before his death in February 2021.

Wayne Shorter passed away this morning at the age of 89. I’m still letting that sink in as I write this. What a remarkable career he had. He was an absolute giant in the world of jazz. The legacy of music he leaves us is vast. There’s no question that musicians and listeners alike will never cease to find new inspiration from Wayne’s recordings and compositions.

My social media feeds have been flooded with memorials and tributes to Wayne from fans who love his music, as well as those who were fortunate enough to work with him or call him a friend. I did not know Wayne well. I interviewed him twice. The first time was in conjunction with liner notes I was asked to write for a CD reissue of Weather Report’s album Tale Spinnin’.

Before we got around to discussing the individual tracks in detail, Wayne spoke from a more expansive perspective. The interview took place in December 2008, when the world was coping with the aftershocks of 2007-8 financial crisis. Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States the previous month. Here is the initial portion of that interview, which I have never published.

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Wayne Shorter: This is what should have been done way back in 1971 [referring to my speaking with him about the album]. They didn’t do any real promotion for those fourteen years we were with them. But then again, they were resistant to the creative process. So just like an airplane needs resistance to take off? That was their main function, to be the resistance so that we could take off in ways that transcended making money. (laughs) That’s their real function. The real function of wealth is to be so resistant that it wakes people up, so people can be creative enough to do things that they wonder, how do you do things without money? How’d they do that without us?

Curt Bianchi: That’s a good way of putting it, especially with the record company.

WS: Everything! Everything. Creative diplomacy, everything. And then you have to have a certain life condition to be reciprocal to that. You have to have a higher life condition. That’s why when people negotiate stuff they come to a stalemate, because their life condition is low. They are parlaying from a position of greed, anger, and animosity. I’m speaking Buddhism now.

CB: Those words are interesting given the current economic conditions we find ourselves in.

WS: Right. Now Tale Spinnin’…

CB: I’ve owned this album since it came out as a record. I was a teenager at the time. In our household we used to buy Weather Report records when they came out. So I’m really glad to be able to do this and to speak with you, too.

WS: You know, that title tells about the content of the album. We used to sit around in the studio trying to think of a title for the album, and we talked about how people told tales in the old days—folk tales—and we actually started talking about these stories. Like Joe Zawinul talked about when he was a kid, talking about werewolves and things. And there were the old people, the grandfathers and great grandfathers, who said if you weren’t good the Krampus would come and get you. And I asked, what is Krampus? He said it was somebody who transformed into some kind of animal, like a large bunny rabbit or something, but so large that it would be frightening to a kid. And that was the word, Krampus, in Austria, in folklore. And we went on from one story to another, and everybody started contributing, bringing stories in, and we arrived at that name, Tale Spinnin’.

CB: You anticipated my question about that title. But also, you know how people always tried to describe Weather Report’s music, assigning it a term like fusion, but the term never actually worked very well. So I wanted to ask you about this idea of storytelling. Would that be a more accurate way of describing Weather Report’s music than a specific genre?

WS: Well, actually, the name Weather Report is the key, because the weather is unpredictable. And it’s hard to control the weather. When we were sitting around in Clive Davis’s office—he was the head of Columbia at the time—we were thinking and thinking and thinking. And somebody said, “Let’s call it a group. The Audience.” No, no, no. (laughs) There were a lot of people in that room, sitting on the floor, you know. Actually, that’s the only creative process that happened between us and the executives.

And I was thinking, “They have the news about the weather every evening, and the weather is something that nobody can predict. And this music we are doing has something about not being predictable or something like that,” And I said, “How about The Weather Report?” And we took the “The” off it: Weather Report. And everybody said, “Yeah!” And it all clicked.

The weather report can be an analogy to almost anything if you stretch it out. Like, when somebody says they are going to tell you a story, you don’t know what they are going to tell you until they start talking. You listen to them. You sit around the fireplace, “Let’s tell stories.” And the anticipation of not knowing what’s going to happen adds to the excitement. So that’s what we tried to do with every album, including Tale Spinnin’.

It’s almost like musicians taking photographs totally without their instruments. The photographer asks, can I get a shot of you with your horn, or your piano? No. (laughs) The thing is, we would say we were born without our instrument. (laughs) We were trying to force them to portray us as personalities—they do that after you are well known, but we started out that way—and not as a way of marketing the music, the ways that they thought were guaranteed so that you would have to conform to, and actually, do what they did by—like disrobing, like leaving your integrity at the door.

CB: So how do you manage to maintain your integrity through that process? This was a band that was together for a long time.

WS: Yeah, thirteen, fourteen years. We just kept doing what we did without asking anything, and we knew that it would take a long time for anything to start clicking. And they would kind of throw a tease in there. “Well, you know, this group Genesis, it took them nine months to click.”

CB: That wasn’t just a tease, that was a dig, wasn’t it?

WS: Yeah. And other things. They wanted us to simplify the music, to make it A-B-C. And I’m thinking, hey, life ain’t simple!

CB: What was cool about those Weather Report records was that each one was different, as you suggested. It was like the musical universe expanded with each one. Tale Spinnin’ was different from Mysterious Traveller, Black Market was different from Tale Spinnin’, and so on. It just seemed like there was a lot of creativity and expansion in those records that was really remarkable.

WS: Yeah. And it’s a funny thing. Those records like Tale Spinnin’ and stuff, right now there’s a sort of a call in those records to, at this time, to really be creative in the midst of a financial meltdown and all the fears that people have. When you are really scared, that is the time to muster the courage to create with no money. And the sincerity of creation will activate the ultimate law of cause and effect.

I don’t call it the beginning of creation—to me there is no such thing as the beginning—but it activates what I call eternal potential. And that potential emanates through every living being. And when things happen that you don’t understand, you say, “How the hell did that happen? How did Obama come to be?” You know what I mean? Or a simple lottery, somebody wins. In many circumstances it just seems like this thing happens. And the many become less-many and more large—instead of micro, more macro.

Back in the fifties, besides the process of payola, when something became a hit that didn’t sound like the usual ding-dong three-chord changes or four-chord changes—“moon June swoon, I love you, my baby left me,” and all that shit—they said they didn’t know why something became popular when it wasn’t supposed to be popular. And I think it’s this whole thing of cause and effect, where something profound strikes the dormant profundity in people. It’s dormant most of the time, but some of the time it wakes up a little bit, you know?

CB: And do you think that in times like now, when a stressful situation exists for many people, that it awakens that quality that you are describing?

WS: Yeah. Or somebody might call it your spiritual enlightenment beginning to take definite form—the path of enlightenment. Your wisdom has been waiting to grow. The potential is there, but it is waiting to burst through all these layers of bullshit. But you need the bullshit in order to grow! (laughs)

And there’s a great example of that: the lotus flower. The lotus flower only thrives in a swampy area, in jungles, in murky water. And when the flower blooms, the murky water around it becomes clear. So the murky water equates to the world that we live in—the spice and all that—and when enlightenment happens, the clarity starts. There have been many examples of that, and then it gets covered up and starts again, and covered up. And more people wake up to their eternal potential.

I’m not spinning a tale right now, but I guess in music we try to do that without having that kind of philosophical base. I hadn’t had that until I arrived at investigating it at age forty [when Wayne began to study Buddhism]. You know, “What in the hell is all this for? What is music for? What is anything for?” And sometimes we discussed that in other words. And those album titles, and the music that we did in Weather Report, were what you might call an instance of transcending business as usual, and having the music become interior decoration rather than just decorative stuff to reminisce with.

CB: Well, the fact that they’re putting this album out again thirty years later means that you had some success in that regard, right?

WS: Yeah. But in relation to the creators and their families, the heirs of the people—I’m not talking about anything financial—but something greater than music can grow out of that thirty years later. Music can be kind of like a flashlight into this unknown. (laughs)

But anyways, Tale Spinnin’, I don’t know how you can put this, but we were telling stories, a lot of stories. And the guys in the recording room, in the studio, were bringing their version of folk tales and ghost stories, and all that stuff. Incidents that are not mysterious or ghostly, but something akin to small miracles—very interesting anecdotes. And you try to, as Miles Davis said, (imitating Miles) “You know all those stories you talk about? Try to play that.”

CB: Joe always talked about how he was a storyteller.

WS: Well, Joe and I spoke a lot about things, and he and I talked about how his family got started. And when Jaco came on the scene, Jaco would add things to it. Peter Erskine had things to say. Alphonso [Johnson] had stores to tell us; not just stories, but things that really happened. And we would kind of polish off a recording session with that kind of thing simmering at the completion of the record. That kind of stuff would be simmering. No conversation, no words. That idea that nothing is wasted in life. Good or bad, negative or positive. Nothing is really wasted. Everything goes somewhere to become fertilizer for something else.

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Rest In Peace, Wayne. Thanks for the music, your words, your being.

Chuck Bazemore, 1949–2022

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Chuck Bazemore passed away on October 8. He was 73 years old.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Bazemore was a fixture in the city’s late-sixties / early-seventies soul scene. He excelled at playing the drums from an early age and was a member of the all-Philadelphia jazz band in high school. Upon graduation Chuck was invited to play with the Philadelphia Philharmonic. Instead, he hit the road as the drummer for the R&B vocal group the Delfonics, which was then riding high on the strength of its million-selling single “La-La (Means I Love You).” Bazemore subsequently toured with many of Philadelphia’s top vocal groups, including the Three Degrees, Patti LaBelle, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and the Tymes.

Though not a well-known name in Weather Report lore, Bazemore likely would have been the drummer on Tale Spinnin’ had a family tragedy not called him home. Since he neither recorded nor toured with Weather Report, his participation with the band has been something of a mystery over the years. Joe Zawinul referred obliquely to Chuck in a 1976 interview when he said, “With Tale Spinnin’ we didn’t have a band and we had to make a record, and we tried to get a band together, and we rehearsed all the music with the drummer, and by the time we came into the studio, the drummer freaked out, man. All of a sudden that pressure on him to follow our albums, like Mysterious Traveller, he just couldn’t handle it.”

There was a reason Bazemore “freaked out,” as Zawinul put it, which I discovered when I interviewed Chuck in 2017 for my book Elegant People: A History of the Band Weather Report. The following is our interview, lightly edited. I started off asking Bazemore how his involvement with Weather Report came about. (At the time, Weather Report had concluded its 1974 touring with drummer Darryl Brown and was preparing for its next album, Tale Spinnin’. Brown inquired about the future and was told that Joe and Wayne were going in a different direction and looking at “some studio drummers.”)

Chuck Bazemore: It all started when Alphonso Johnson gave me a call in Philadelphia. I went down to audition for Alphonso, and he called Weather Report and said, “We got a drummer.” That’s how we got started. So they flew me to California and I rehearsed with them for about three and a half months. We were working on an album, preparing to go into the studio.

Curt: Did you know Alphonso before this?

Chuck: Oh, yes I did. Me and Alphonso used to work together in Philadelphia. I can’t think of the name of the bands, but we knew one and other. Once you’re around Philly and you’re a good musician, everybody hears about you and everybody wants you. He knew later on that I went with the Delfonics, but I was still playing behind other people. I always liked jazz and fusion, but playing with the Delfonics and the other people I was working with—the R&B people and the blues people—was a different style. So Weather Report gave me time to stretch out—to lock in, but stretch out—to play my syncopated beats that I wanted to do, which was great. That’s how I got with them. I could improvise and I could also read music.

Curt: You were there in L.A. for three and a half months or three and a half weeks?

Chuck: It wasn’t three and a half weeks. I thought it was like three and a half months, but it could have been shorter.

Curt: Okay, so you were there for a while. Alphonso finding you must have been a relief to Alphonso. [laughs]

Chuck: Well, Alphonso really got most of the drummers there, like Chester Thompson—all the Philly guys, as a matter fact—Ishmael Wilburn and everybody else. All of us were well known in Philadelphia. Well known in California, too—not only just playing for Weather Report, but playing for everybody. I was a freelance drummer playing behind everybody. I wanted to play with Weather Report steady, but things happened with my family.

Curt: So what happened that you didn’t play on the album?

Chuck: While I was there, everything was great. Wayne Shorter and Joe, Alyrio Lima and myself, and Alphonso. Right before rehearsal we always sat down and talked around the table, had something to eat. That was great. This way you could feel one an- other and get the chemistry going. We studied our charts, studied the music, what we had to do. And they were trying to go into like a funk band. That’s why they called me. In Philadelphia I was known for my foot because I had a unique style. They called me “Heavy Sound” Chuck Bazemore.

So everything was going great, but as soon as I got into the recording studio, I got a call that my daughter had passed away. Her name was Casey Brooks. My thinking just went blank. Everything changed. After all that rehearsal I just couldn’t think. After Casey passed away, it took a hold on me. So I just flew back to Pennsylvania. I stayed in contact with the guys, just talking to them and everything, and said I would love to come back, but I just couldn’t do it.

Curt: That’s completely understandable. Did you go home immediately?

Chuck: No, I just felt like I had to go back home because all that rehearsing went right out the window. Once something like that happens, you can’t think right. I tried to finish the session but I was just thinking about my daughter who passed away. You know, if anybody goes through this, they know exactly what I’m talking about. After my daughter passed, everything went blank. I just freaked out and none of my recordings were released. They did everything with Ndugu Leon Chancler, which was good. I was happy for that.

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In a subsequent telephone call, Chuck said that while he was in L.A., he got a call from Weather Report’s manager, Bob Devere, who told him that his pregnant wife was in the hospital. Bazemore flew back to Philadelphia excited, expecting to welcome a new daughter into the world. But there were complications with the delivery and Casey was stillborn. This version of events differs somewhat from his previous explanation, but I think they can be reconciled. Given this extra info, what likely happened is that Chuck was in L.A. for a period of time rehearsing material, returned to Philadelphia for the birth of his daughter, then came back to L.A. to do the recording sessions. However, upon his return he simply couldn’t concentrate given the gravity of what had happened, and wound up returning home without completing the recording.

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Curt: The first time we talked, you said something about Joe telling you he wanted a funk style. What did he tell you?

Chuck: He was looking for a funk-style syncopated beat, and I was known for that. Not just playing a straight beat; like have a heavy foot and a lot of top, and working around everything. And Weather Report really helped me a lot, getting that way for jazz and fusion, because I was always a funk drummer. When I was with the Delfonics, I was like a “love” drummer. But I had different styles because my uncle was a jazz drummer and he taught me a lot. I didn’t play with a lot of jazz people until I got with Weather Report. I did some things with Pat Martino in Philadelphia, and that was good. And then I had an audition for Jean-Luc Ponty, but I didn’t take that because I wanted to stay with R&B.

Curt: When they called you out to L.A., was it your impression that you had the gig, that you were going to record the album and stay on and tour afterwards?

Chuck: Well, that was the intention, to go in the studio and record the album, and then go on tour. They were trying to go another route, to get the funk in, get that foot in. Because as you noticed from their past with other drummers, they had other drummers who they rehearsed with, but once when they go on tour, it’s not the same. A studio drummer and a touring drummer are different. A studio drummer will listen and lock in with everything. A tour drummer will do the same thing, but improvise. You’ve got to watch and listen because everything changes on stage and you can’t mess up. And that’s what happens with a lot of drummers. That’s why they had more than one drummer. They might have one drummer that can play, another drummer that can improvise and go around it. So they said, “Well, you know what, we need one drummer that can do everything.” I was both. I was a studio drummer and I was a funk drummer. Because I had a name out of Philly, everybody wanted me.

Curt: Did Joe give you a lot of direction in the sessions? He’s kind of notorious for being hard on drummers.

Chuck: Well, the main thing Joe said was, just listen. Because the music that we had, we went over and over and over, and everybody got it inside their heads. Sometimes you might improvise, throw something else in there, and you just listen and work around that, and eventually you’ll come back to where you want to be. Wayne would say, “Just go with the flow, like water.” He always said that. Now I understand exactly what he meant by that, but at the time he was saying it, nobody knew what he was talking about.

Curt: What do you think he meant?

Chuck: The flow of water. Like when the water flows, you just go with the flow of the water as he speaks. Like, you just blend in. Keep blending in and don’t leave. Don’t float under and just stay on top. [laughs] Whatever that means, only Wayne knows that. Wayne was like that. Really super nice guy, though. Really down to earth. You just got to be around him to understand him.

Curt: In terms of bringing the material to you guys, how developed was it? Or was it more or less developed on the spot in the studio.

Chuck: It was both ways, to tell you the truth. I know when I was with Alphonso, he was studying the music, and I would listen to the bass lines that he would play. And then when we went into the studio, I worked with that and listened to Joe to see what Joe’s playing, and listened to what Wayne Shorter’s playing, and then we all blended in. And Alyrio Lima just worked around everything with the percussion. Mostly, it was on the drummer. Everything was always on the drummer. That’s what Joe needed. He just wanted things to work around the drummer. That’s why he had so many drummers. Some worked out and some didn’t.

Curt: Did you ever play a gig with the band?

Chuck: No, it was only just rehearsing and going into the studio, just to have a funk album. Once I left Weather Report and went back down to Philly, I was playing behind everybody, but I was [playing] too busy because I was so used to working with Weather Report, playing different chops. Everybody loved it, but they said, “You’ve got to tone it down.” So I started working with a friend, Bennie Sims, who had a thing called the Jazz Experience. It was almost like Weather Report and the Yellowjackets. That was more my speed.

Curt: I understand your real name is John Bazemore. Where did the “Chuck” come from?

Chuck: My birth name is John Todd Bazemore, Jr. Chuck came from when I was little. I used to be fat, and everybody called me Chubby or Chucky. I grew up with that name and it stuck. No one from my family calls me John; everybody calls me Chuck and Uncle Chuck. When I go on Google, I can’t find my real name. Everything is under Chuck Bazemore, so I kept it. [laughs] Even the musicians, even my own family doesn’t know my name is John, because they’re used to calling me Chuck and Chuckie and Uncle Chuckie and Cousin Chuckie.

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Chuck was always proud to be associated with Weather Report, as the accompanying photograph suggests. After his touring days ended, he remained in Philadelphia where he started a chimney sweep business while playing casual gigs on the side. Rest In Peace, Chuck Bazemore.

Dave Smith, 1950–2022

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When I heard the news that synthesizer pioneer Dave Smith died on June 1, my mind wandered to the rendition of “In a Silent Way” that appears on Weather Report’s 1979 album 8:30. I heard it played live at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. It was a beautiful performance, with Joe’s exquisite string patch backing Wayne’s soprano saxophone. That string sound came from Joe’s newly acquired Prophet-5 synthesizer, the instrument for which Smith is best know.

Smith’s path to the Prophet-5 began in 1972 when he purchased a Moog Minimoog. Utilizing his skills as an electrical and software engineer, Smith soon starting building accessories to the Minimoog for his personal use, one of which was an electronic music sequencer. Thinking he might be able to sell it to others, he founded a small company in 1974 that operated out of his apartment in Sunnyvale, California. He named it Sequential Circuits—a nod to his first product.

In 1977, Smith followed that up with the Model 700 Programmer, which could store the settings of an ARP 2600 or Minimoog. Joe bought two programmers, one for each of his 2600s. They greatly simplified the setup of his 2600s, allowing him to store 64 patches each, which could later be retrieved by pressing a few buttons, bypassing the laborious process of reconfiguring the sliders on the 2600s’ front panels.

Between the sequencer and the programmer, Smith did well enough to quit his day job and move operations from his apartment to a nearby industrial complex in the heart of Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the microprocessor revolution had just begun. The first commercially successful personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800, hit the market in January 1975, while the Apple II was released in June 1977.

Smith was well-acquainted with this technology, and he harbored ideas of building a synthesizer around it. But the advantages of doing so were so clear to him that he figured the established synth manufacturers—Moog and ARP—must have already been working on it, so he was inclined to stick with accessory devices. However, when Smith attended his first NAMM show in June 1977, visitor after visitor to his booth suggested that he combine his sequencer and programmer with a synthesizer. On the flight back home, he thought about it some more and had a change of heart.

Smith got together with a musician and clinician named John Bowen, and together they worked out the design for a five-voice polyphonic synthesizer. It would have a sound architecture similar to a Minimoog, but the front panel knobs would control the settings for all of the voices simultaneously. More crucially, digital technology made it straightforward to save all of the synthesizer settings in computer memory, allowing the instrument to have a large bank of programs or patches, each of which could be recalled instantly. At the time, no one else had a synthesizer that could do that. In July 1977, Smith went to work on the project in earnest. His goal was to show his synthesizer to the public six months later.

Smith toiled in secret, but as the winter NAMM show approached, word got around that he had a polyphonic synthesizer. On the first morning of the show, representatives from Moog, Oberheim, and ARP all gathered at Sequential’s booth to have a look, but there was no synthesizer to be found. That’s because the one and only prototype was still in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Smith was working feverishly to get it to the point where it could be demoed.

After pulling an all-nighter, he took the one-hour flight down to Southern California, ambled into Sequential Circuit’s booth at around noon and set up the synth, now named the Prophet-5. “It mostly worked, most of the time,” Smith recalled. “It would crash once in a while and we’d have to restart it. But it was certainly operational enough to blow everybody away.”

Dave Smith at the Sequential Circuits factory in 1978. Photo: Sequential.
The Prophet-5 was a milestone in the evolution of synthesizers. As the first with an embedded microprocessor, its technology leapfrogged the competition. More critically, it gave musicians what they wanted: A polyphonic, fully programmable synthesizer that sounded fantastic. If you were serious about playing keyboards, you had to have one, even if you couldn’t afford the $3,995 price tag. Sequential Circuits came away from the show with orders for 400 units.

Right after Smith got back to the Bay Area, Joe’s keyboard technician, Alan Howarth, heard about “this Prophet-5 thing” from his music store friends back in his hometown of Cleveland, so he put in a call to Sequential’s Sunnyvale office. “Man, I heard you were at the NAMM show and you had something amazing,” Howarth said, asking if he could come up and have a look. “And I went up and visited Dave Smith in his little shop. The Prophet-5 from the NAMM show was sitting on the table. I took one look at it and said, ‘We gotta have it.’”

Inventing the Prophet-5 would have been enough to secure Dave Smith’s place in the pantheon of synthesizer pioneers, but his most far-reaching achievement was spearheading the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard so that instruments from different manufacturers could communicate with each other. It was demonstrated at the January 1983 NAMM show, when keyboards from Roland and Sequential Circuits were connected via a cable and played each other’s sounds. Up to that point, the various synth makers each developed their own schemes for connecting their devices, but no standard existed for general interoperability.

Despite some grumbling from the various manufacturers who were naturally invested in their own technologies, MIDI quickly established itself, and virtually all keyboards released from 1983 on were MIDI-equipped. Soon, personal computers also came with MIDI interfaces, leading to a wave of new software and hardware products that changed the face of music production. In recognition of his efforts, Smith is now known as “the father of MIDI.”

Dave continued to design and implement innovative musical instruments throughout his life, most recently at his company Sequential, which sells a modernized version of the Prophet-5 and Prophet-10 synthesizers. Joe wound up acquiring three Prophet-5s, as well as a successor model, the Prophet-T8, which he continued using right up to his last concert in 2007, 24 years after the instrument was manufactured! (Look for the Prophet-T8 logo at around the 3:32 mark in this video.)

Wayne and Jaco got their own Prophet-5s, too. In fact, Jaco’s second wife Ingrid remembered how Jaco used it to compose his most enduring composition, “Three Views of a Secret.” “He had recently moved into my tiny apartment, and it was the newly acquired Prophet 5 that helped him evolve the tune,” she said.

Not many people can lay claim to changing music. Dave Smith did. Rest in peace.

Banner photo credit: Sequential.

Barry Harris, 1929–2021

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Pianist Barry Harris died last week at the age of 91. According to his business partner Howard Rees, Harris’s death was caused by complications of Covid-19.

A “steadfast champion of bebop,” as the obituary in the Detroit Free Press put it, Harris was perhaps the best living exponent of the bebop style of jazz piano, revered by many for his playing and his generous spirit when it came to codifying the bebop language and teaching it to others.

Though he was never affiliated with a major educational institution, Harris was renowned for leading informal sessions in which he taught bebop to other musicians, starting in his home in 1950s Detroit, and later at various venues throughout New York City. Many significant musicians came under his tutelage, but Harris was welcoming to students at all levels. Eventually he taught clinics around the world. Harris maintained informal weekly sessions with students until just before his death. According to Mark Stryker, who wrote Harris’s obituary for NPR, Harris taught his last class, via Zoom, on Nov. 20.

Decades earlier, Joe Zawinul was one of the recipients of Harris’s generosity. When Joe settled in New York City in 1959, the city was full of excellent jazz pianists, none of whom, according to Zawinul, sounded like the other. Joe practiced with many of them, trying to soak up as much knowledge as he could. One style that he wasn’t exposed to in Austria was bebop, and there was no one better to practice bebop with than Barry Harris, who had preceded Joe in Cannonball Adderley’s band. They used to get together at a rehearsal room at Riverside Records, which was Harris’s label.

“Barry and I used to rehearse together a lot at that time,” Joe recalled in 1984. “It was kind of a one-sided relationship in one respect, though. I got a lot from him. Coming to jazz when and where I did, I missed the bebop thing, and that was the style of piano playing I wanted to learn. To my mind, Barry was about the closest there was to the pure bebop style—after Bud Powell, that is. Barry has got that down beautifully; he’s a superb musician. We used to spend all our time at Riverside Records’s studios, rehearsing. As I say, he gave me a great deal, and I will never forget it or be able to replay him for it.”

Around 1965, Harris was involved in an incident that motivated Joe to evolve his own personal style of playing. He related the story to me in a 2003 interview:

I was standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Broadway, which is right where Birdland was. And Barry Harris comes out of a cab, and says, “Joe! I gotta tell you something, man. It’s killing me, man!”

“Yeah, what is that?”

“The tune I just heard on the radio in the cab, it was Cannonball, and I swear to God I thought it was me playing, and then they announced it was you, man. Congratulations!”

I said, “Thank you, Barry.” And I was flattered for a minute. But when I thought about it, I said, well, now… What the hell does that mean, man? He’s already copying Bud Powell, and I’m copying him. What the hell is this? So I went home… I went home, right then and there, and put all my records in cellophane, and they are still in it, stashed away. And I never listen to music. I don’t listen to music, not even to my own. I listen to music now because I have to work on it. The moment it’s done, I don’t even know the name of the tunes. I really don’t.

Joe retained warm feelings for Harris throughout his life. But as the 1970s unfolded, Harris grew disillusioned with the music scene in general, which he expressed in a 1977 Down Beat profile. “Harris doesn’t go out to listen to other musicians very often,” the article stated, “explaining that ‘the music has no class now at all.’ ‘I don’t go to clubs much, ’cause musically I can’t deal too much with most of what’s going on—the commercialism, the avant garde musicians.’”

“I’ve been able to make it here (New York) a little bit, not much,” Harris added. “I make enough to send my family some money sometimes. The last few years I’ve been much luckier than I’ve been in my life, and I’ve still never made any money in my life. I’ve made a lot of records and I’ve never received a royalty check off a record in my life. And yet, everywhere in the world I’ve been, I’ve seen my records. It’s pretty weird . . .”

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Harris felt that the younger generations of jazz musicians had sold out the music. He made those feelings clear when he was part of a 1990 jazz piano roundtable that appeared in Keyboard magazine. “Right now, the word ‘jazz’ is like a garbage dump,” he said. “Everything that they can’t classify, they say—ploop!—‘Jazz.’”

When the other panelists brought up the subject of Weather Report in the context of defining jazz, Harris went off: “What kills me about those kinds of groups is that when someone has a jazz festival, they bring these cats together and call them a jazz group. See, I’m one of those people who believes that you cannot lie twenty-three hours of the day and be real for one hour. You can’t be untruthful to something, and then suddenly be this real person and show me that you can do it.”

The interview session went on:

Richie Beirach: Barry, the thing about Weather Report is that there’s no doubt about their jazz credentials. I loved that group; they did great music. But the emphasis was not on improvisation. It was on color, orchestration, and composition.

Harris: Zawinul and all those cats wrote certain tunes that showed their intent. I mean, if you wrote those tunes under the auspices of them being jazz tunes, then you knew they were leading somewhere funny. Joe Zawinul—oh, man, I hate to talk about that cat. It’s almost like we should be blessed because he brought his music to us from Europe.

Beirach: I saw him playing with Dinah Washington, though.

Harris: I know, but when I used to be over here on 46th Street, and I’d go to the studio and practice all day, Joe Zawinul was the first person to come in and stay with me all day [i.e., learning from Harris]. So when you mention those names, I’m real negative about them. I can’t call them jazz musicians.

Kirk Nurock: What you’re saying is fascinating, because it illustrates that this gray area is very controversial.

Harris: Oh, yeah. What makes me mad is that the musicians who were working, young cats—Herbie Hancock, all these cats—they were the ones who was working! They was working more than me! They were the ones who were really helping jazz! And they are the ones who went over to somewhere else. Now, that I don’t understand. They were making it with the music—they were making it!

Beirach: Well, they were making it in your eyes, but maybe it wasn’t enough for them.

Harris: Money, you mean.

Beirach: Well, money, exposure…

Harris: Money!
. . .
Harris: See, I get funny when you mention things like Weather Report.

Nurock: I noticed.

When the journalist Leonard Feather brought Harris’s comments to Joe’s attention later that year, Zawinul laughed it off. “I like Barry Harris,” he responded. “I have no problem with what people say. He is one of the finest, but he’s a copy of Bud Powell. I have arrived, you see. Last summer the Montmartre in Copenhagen they had a list of coming attractions. They had Betty Carter, and they identified her as a jazz vocalist. They bill some band and described it as a rock group. But with my name they had no description. They just said ‘Zawinul.’ Not jazz, not rock, just me. I am my own category.”

Of course, the beauty of it all is that the world is large enough to accommodate both Zawinul and Harris. The former learned bebop so that he could leave it behind in order to forge his own style, while the latter devoted his life to spreading the bebop gospel so that it continues to be played by new generations of jazz pianists.

Rest in peace, Barry Harris.

Harris photo credit: Mirko Caserta, A Day With Barry Harris, 2007.