George Benson Vs. Barry Harris - The ULTIMATE Showdown

In this video we are going to talk about two absolute legends of jazz, we are going to talk about Barry Harris, one of the best-known jazz educators, and we are going to talk about George Benson, one of the best jazz guitarists now that Benson is not known . an educator per se, but his approach can be contrasted with that of Barry Harris to really learn a lot about both and also to learn how Barry Harris' method may or may not apply to the guitar. We're going to use Benson as our model. If Benson isn't your guy, you'll still learn a lot here and I wanted to do this because I've seen a lot of guitarists on YouTube talk about the Barry Harris method without talking about how that approach may or may not apply to guitar now, yeah, you.

You could play some of the same notes on the guitar, but there's a lot going on with the Barry Harris method, some of the nuances, some of the details regarding how we would play or play those notes that we just don't see happening when guitarists They really play jazz when they're ascending, descending, thinking in different scales, so I want to use Benson as that counterexample and in doing so we're going to learn a lot. I have a PDF for this that you can get for free if you're watching this for the first week to reward those of you who watch my videos from the beginning, let's talk about Barry's chromatic scale first and this is one way he talks about the type of ascending patterns when we play our line, now we take a normal C major scale, so C d e f g a b c and the idea here is that we want all the notes of the scale to fall on our downbeats and this is important because many times when we try to make our lines sound like they fit into harmony, we want those chord tones to fall on the downbeat, so in the eighth note lines we have a downbeat part and then the next note would be the downbeat, so we get this combination of two low beats and high beats, but the problem is that the C major scale or any major scale has seven unique notes, so we can't make a smooth loop, so the solution here is that we want to make sure let each of these scale notes fall on the descending beat and then the next note we play as the chromatic note, so we have C as the descending beat C sharp as our positive beat, which allows our next major scale note D fall on another descending beat so we can continue doing that right 1, 2 and 3 whenever we have a half step in our scale and We'll also apply this to another scale, whenever we have a half step in our scale, we can't immediately go to it because that would put the scale note on an optimistic beat, instead we just jump to the next note in the scale, so if we are on the third, we jump instead of the fourth, go to the fifth and then back to the fourth, so we get one and 2 and three and four from here from F to G is a full step so have that half step between that FP just continue because these are all half steps now we get to B and the next note after B is C just a half step, so again we need to jump to the note after the one that is D and then go back to C, so our concept of a full chromatic scale according to Barry is this.

Now you can notice that I have to make this little change here, we will discuss this later and why it is really important for a guitarist to think about this. Okay, so that's for the C major scale. What if we are on a C7 and we want to play our Mixel liian scale or scale that fits C7? The same idea takes the concept and we go up so that each of the notes in our scale falls on and down and then every time we have that half step, we jump to another note in the scale, so most of it is the same c c Shar D now we get to a, our next half step in the scale would be B flat because C7 has a B flat, so we have to jump up to C and then continue so that the full scale for C7 sounds like this and over our C7.

This is a great way to understand bbop lines and a lot of how Charlie Parker played, which is one. from the guys that Barry Harris studied and came up with this concept and for this video we're just looking at one of George Benson's live solos like all the examples, so this is a Stella By Starlight that has a lot of different types of lines, um. but we're only going to look at that one, so I'm not selecting lines here. When we look at how Benson would do Ascend, we never see him do this type of pattern and I think one of the main reasons for this is because of these extra chromatic notes we ended up having a change between five frets, so when he was doing this you kept seeing this change down and it's not very natural or comfortable on the guitar to go up that way, in my opinion, what do we see guys doing? well, whether it's Wes Benson Joe Pass, whatever, we see a lot of arpeggios because they fit so comfortably on the guitar, we see a lot of descending sweet stuff, um or we just see a standard scale pattern, so let's look at two examples of this solo that Benson does just to show that at one point there's F 7 in this uh key of C Starlight and Benson is just using E minor 7 and then basically a diminution pattern here C sharp E G and then C to get this. type of pattern, it's like that, either using arpeggios like in that example or what we'll see if you're going to play something a little more scalar is basically using the scale that you're thinking of, so the next line comes over F7 and Es in largely just a scale pattern within a small enclosure at the beginning, so it ends there because it resolves to G now with this scale, I could have added at any of those points some of these chromatic half steps, but we don't.

I don't hear that kind of line from Benson, it's actually on the scale and the chromaticism that we hear from him usually comes in the form of an enclosure to tie that together, which leads to the next big point that a lot of guys will talk about. Barry Harris will think of a 251 progression, he'll think of the fifth chord as the chord he's playing over, so if it was on C D Minor 7 G7 C major Barry would be thinking of that G7 and then we have other guitarists who would do it. I'll be thinking about the two chords, so D Minor 7 and Yen Larsson had a really good video recently, um, discussing this comparison between Barry Harris and Pat Martino, well, we see something very similar in what Benson does where he really thinks about the two chords more than you think about the 5th chord and in some cases you're thinking about something else so let's break it down this line here from Benson on F7 shows me very clearly that you're thinking in C minor a two type approach and it sounds So.

Well, then why would we say that this is thinking about both? How do we know if Benson is playing this? The main thing is that we didn't get it to be a natural third of the dominant chord and we were thinking about the possibilities of the dominant chord. Would we play that naturally? Instead, we get arpeggios and ideas that fit more in C minor, this E-flat major 7, but that C is like a C minor 9, jumps to E-flat, which may or may not have been a miscalculation. the jump um to the speed at which the solo was played either way sounds really cool and then it drops another E flat major 7 with the C, so it's actually all C minor 9 so far, ending with this again, another guy of idea in C minor 5 3 flat 3 2 1 so that was all just C minor in that approach, let's look at one more example on this F7 from later in the solo and we start with that E flat here we only get the third of that F7 right at the end, it's like I'm dealing with mostly C minor and then just a quick F7, the whole C minor arpeggio and that a isn't even about being the third of F7, it's about this enclosure from the B natural to the leader major. in our G, so it's clear here that Benson is taking a similar approach to West and many others in the genre of treating this more like a two chord than a five chord; however, there are some examples later where Benson really doesn't. he even he's thinking about the two chords or the five chords and instead he's layering a lot of his own great ideas on top of them and we'll get to those in a moment.

The third thing I want to discuss here is the connection of Barry Harris' half step downward rules. what we did at the beginning with our chromatic scale concept, but this time in the context in which we descend and how we could do it with many chromatic notes, which Benson does frequently, but he does it in a slightly different way, literally changing. a half step on one of the notes that Barry would have used, but it makes a big difference when we play it on the guitar and I'm going to show it to you right now, so let's take this line that Benson does on an E7 and then see how Barry could play this similar type of descending line, what would you do differently to make Benson's line sound like this one two this one E7 going to minor one two one two okay, so we're on E7 and we're actually descending from that e, we have that little C sharp that gets us there, but we have a beginning of a chromatically descending pattern from that root, so if we were applying Berry's chromatic concept here we could get a line that sounds. like this one 2 one two now there's nothing wrong with that line we have a lot more chromatic notes happening here again we have this little change with a five fret range one thing that's different is that now we have our resolution not on beat one but on beat 2 because of the amount of chromatic notes we added, so if we want this to fit more like Benson's line where we start in that same part of the phrase and end in the same place, here's how we could adjust the amount of semitones one two okay, now this one fits much better because we only have a four note fret space fan and we can also end on that downbeat, let's take a look at what's happening here with Benson, that is, that difference half-step From how Barry might approach it, the main thing I want to discuss here is, and I've discussed this in other videos, so I won't go into it too much, the fact that Bon tends to apply his descending patterns in two or two. four notes per string, kind of an idea, sometimes six notes, so even notes in general, but mainly two notes or four notes, as we saw in this first example example, so first we had six notes which are always down , up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. up down up two notes down up two notes down up four notes down up down up this allows you to play this type of line very efficiently and some of Barry Harris' rules would break that if we take a look at one of these lines We see that the half step difference here is just the inclusion of that diminished pattern at the end on the right, instead of going, we're avoiding one of those notes to get an even number of notes per string and that's really the main difference here.

With Benson's approach and Barry Harris' approach is that for the guitar as a guitarist who follows Benson's type of picking and style, we have to make some adjustments to what Barry is talking about so that we can get that even number of notes per rope and that's really what Benson is. In some of his approaches, he tends to worry more about having four descending notes per string than what specific chromatic notes. Those four notes are another example of this, not from Stella By Starlet would be this line, so it just starts descending chromatically from the C Shar, this ended on A7, so far that all fits Barry Harris, but instead of doing it after a G Shar and a g, it just jumps right into this kind of diminished pattern, so it skips that G sharp and then the same thing here just four. note the first string because it fits the guitar so well, so that's the bottom line.

This is a great example of why we want to learn things from what Barry is doing, but make sure we also see how some of these Masters actually apply it and that's what I hope to share with you today, okay, and the fourth thing that what I want to discuss here is this concept of target notes or no target notes and I heard this from Chris Parks on things I learned from Barry Harris' excellent YouTube channel. Channel you guys should check out if you're not already checking it out and I think this is episode 80, it's discussing some of this and it talks about the idea that Barry Harris doesn't think about Target note rules, they don't mean anything. as long as it doesn't sound good, but you certainly don't want to limit yourself and I think the idea of ​​target notes is too limiting, at least it's too limiting for me and this is actually connected to that idea from before. that Barry is thinking about the five chords and in that, because of his full chromatic scale approach, Barry could start his idea on any note and he knows which semitones or chromatics to add to make it sound good, so that way he's not aiming specifically like a root a third a fifth a seventh could start on the fourth could start on the second any of that would work for him so that's Barry's approach from what I understand now a lot of other guys will tend to have this approach of reach certain major chord tones of harmony andLet's look at that in this example from Benson where he's layering some other arpeggios on top of E7, it's like he's going to play some F major 7 arpeggios, but he still gets to the third and then when the resolution comes he still gets to that third, like this which seems very clear that at least your ear is guiding you towards these target notes, so this is again about E7 going into a minor, play this line one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4, let's break that down a little bit, so we have this F major, now you need to get to this G Shar for this E7, so you just play four notes per string again to get to that third of E7, even though a lot of what you played before doesn't. he relates specifically to F major, he doesn't relate specifically to E7, so he's just hitting that target note.

Okay, now we're still on E7, so he plays these cool ideas here almost sound like a full pitch thing, but not quite, if you press e, it would and then what does it do? Get to the minor third for that resolution, the C right there, just jump to it and there's two. notes per string four notes per string ending on that D, at which point you might still be thinking about E7 type things or maybe you're trying to get to the 11th of a minor, which is hard to say without hearing the rest of the context than it's touching all of this to say that Benson is definitely getting close to this and we see that in a lot of the use of his enclosures as well from before, where he ends the phrase with an enclosure like a three note enclosure to get to a third or strong center tone of the next chord, so you're clearly targeting certain notes, so neither approach is necessarily better than one or the other, but they are different from each other, so I hope this was insightful for you, since whether for the Barry Harris side or the George Benson side, if you want to see more lessons on Barry Harris or Benson, let me know in the comments and make sure to share this with others, that really helps the channel spread it.

If you want to see more of Benson, I have a ton of videos. You can see some of them here. Thanks for tuning in, guys. See you in the next video.