The Guitar Journal

Jesse Paliotto (00:09)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Guitar Journal podcast, where we love talking about making music, particularly through the lens of fingerstyle and jazz guitar. I'm your host, Jesse Paliotto. I love being able to bring the best of the music community to you here on the Guitar Journal podcast. I am super pumped because today we have with us Chris Parks. Chris is an amazing jazz guitarist and educator based in New Jersey.

chrisparks22 (00:23)
Thank you.

Jesse Paliotto (00:30)
Since early 90s, Chris has been dedicated student of the Barry Harris methodology, which we will

talk about, I think, a little bit. In addition to performing, Chris is a great educator. So he's been sharing knowledge about Barry Harris stuff on his YouTube channel, which has become sort of a standard reference for guitar players. It's called Things I Learned from Barry Harris. I think there's 150 some odd videos up there that Chris has kind of done and offered to the world. But he also teaches on Open Studio, continues to inspire and educate jazz musicians worldwide.

Chris, so glad you are here. Thank you for doing this, man. appreciate it.

chrisparks22 (01:02)
thank you so much for even asking. Very nice. Nice meeting you too, brother.

Jesse Paliotto (01:06)
Absolutely same. I thought maybe just to kick us off a little bit of background, could you share a little bit how you got into playing guitar and what drew you to jazz specifically with guitar?

chrisparks22 (01:19)
sure, yeah, so...

Jesse Paliotto (01:21)
And you can do long version, short version, whatever you want to do. Number it all.

chrisparks22 (01:24)
Well,

I'll give you a medium version. How's that? So my brother, I have an older brother, he was the first person to take guitar lessons when we were younger and he didn't really stay with it. But it kind of planted a seed in my head and then I decided I was going to kind of pursue it. So I did. I found a teacher and I was very into the, you know, all the usual rock music of that time, which at the time was the 80s.

Jesse Paliotto (01:27)
Yeah, okay.

Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (01:51)
So of course I was really into Van Halen and ACDC and all those groups. And then I reached a certain age and my interest slightly changed. started getting into more, instead of Eddie Van Halen, I was interested in Larry Carlton and maybe some other slightly different things. I started to into, interested in...

More song structures like Stevie Wonder and different things like that different chords chords with a major seven in it or something, you know, that was slightly different and then My first year of college I went to community college my first year of community college. I took this course this It was an introduction to jazz course and I thought well, I play guitar, you know so this is gonna be easy and in it was it was

part of the program was you bought these five CDs that had all the different styles from all the genres of jazz all through the years. So I remember when we got up to the bebop years, the professor played, it was Charlie Parker's Embraceable You, I'll Never Forget It. And it was awesome. It's from the Dial and Savoy recordings, which are fantastic. But I remember listening to it and just being like,

I know on our instrument guitar, all those notes exist, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you how he found them or how he came about them, but I just fell in love with it. The second thing that happened right after the professor played that, played, he said, and this was the second take of that, which occurred like 30 seconds later, and it was even more beautiful.

and totally different than the first one. So now that brought about this other thing, which is I was in the rock world where we get used to, you you have a lot of takes of something and then you come up with the best thing and then that's the thing that's repeated, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But now this brought a whole other different element to it that I said, that's the freedom in music and the beauty in music that I want to try to I want to try to figure that out.

Jesse Paliotto (04:03)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (04:08)
And I didn't know where one of those notes were on my instrument. I said, I got to find it. So not soon after, I signed up for Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, had two branches. One was in Brooklyn and one was in Queens. And I found this wonderful guitar player named Ronnie Benher, who was my first real mentor. And even on the first lesson, he said, you know, Chris, if you really love this music, you got to study with Barry because he's really the one.

So I continued studying with Ronnie, but think about that in his first lesson, he said, yeah, hey, you need to find this other person. Now, first of all, what other teacher does that? That never happens. know, most teachers keep you keep their students to themselves. You know, that's the way they that's the way it works. But he was so nice to tell me that. Now, I didn't know this, but at the time, Ronnie was also working in his Barry had a sex tet that he was playing with at the time from time to time. And Ronnie was playing in that and

He was playing around town. He was also playing with this other wonderful pianist named Chris Anderson, was just like wonderful piano player who I discovered later. But yeah, after that, that was when I went to Barry's class for the first time. And that was it. I was hooked after the first time of doing that.

Jesse Paliotto (05:27)
That's incredible. When you were first encountering Barry Harris, so you had already done some music classes, so did you already have sort of the more classical approach to harmony and structure and scales and stuff? Or was this really kind of your first introduction to theory and everything, was through the lens of Barry Harris?

chrisparks22 (05:39)
business.

if it's

Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much. know, had the structure that I had was, you know, what a rock musician usually knows, which is, you know, you know your diatonic chords and you know a pentatonic that fits over most of them. That was basically the structure that I knew. But this was totally, you know, completely unique. So I really started from, you know, it wasn't like the only reason why I knew modes was because that was part of learning rock guitar. And I was into some of the other

Jesse Paliotto (06:00)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (06:16)
rock musicians. I was into Joe Satriani and some of the other shredders. So they would talk about things like modes, but you know, obviously it was totally different once I met Barry. Totally different.

Jesse Paliotto (06:28)
I want to come back in a second, but just to pause like on a little side quest, were there any other like jazz figures or things where you're like, I want to sound like that. Like there was that Embraceable You recording with Charlie Parker. Was there other stuff that for you was like a big influence early on? Like I want to go sound like this person or something or or was it just sort of like I'm just discovering this all and I don't even know yet.

chrisparks22 (06:34)
It's different.

Like I said before, think the connecting tissue to it was I started really listening to Larry Carlton a lot. I loved his playing. thought he had and he was another person where I was like, don't, his approach, where is he even finding some of these notes from? And I thought they were great. And I saw him, a friend of mine and myself went and saw him at the Blue Note. And the second set, we got to sit up.

really close. were literally right on the stage practically. were first table on the stage. And I just remember watching him thinking like, man, I don't have any connection to that at all musically. I have no idea how he's accomplishing any of that. So I really need to figure that out. But I knew I loved it. I loved it, too. But then when I heard it's not like I didn't like Larry Colton anymore. But once I heard Bird, I mean, it was over.

And now it was like, once I heard Bird, I wasn't as fixated on guitar players, really. I was fixated on music and then trying to figure that out musically. And that's also what was great about Barry's class was because once you showed up to class, you realize every kind of instrument is here. There's trumpets, there's saxophone, there's other guitar players, there's pianists, there's singers, there's bass players.

Jesse Paliotto (07:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

chrisparks22 (08:18)
There's violinists, there's everything. So, and then he's barking out these things to play, and then you have to try to figure it out on your instrument, and you're kind of on your own. You know, there's nobody to help you on your particular instrument. And what I loved about his class was he kind of, he really expected you to have it together. Like if he's...

You know, like if you couldn't do something and everybody else was doing it, he would almost look at you like, how come you can't do that? You know, like no understanding of the guitar and some of its limitations, you know, and then of course you're not in a position where you want to like say, well, the fingering here is hard or I'm not in a good position, you know, he doesn't want to hear all that, you know, so was.

Jesse Paliotto (09:01)
Just like you're

the guitar player, you figure it out. That's your job.

chrisparks22 (09:03)
Right.

You know, his point of view was usually like, well, how come all these saxophone players are doing it and the pianos, the piano players are doing it? How come you can't do it? So.

Jesse Paliotto (09:11)
I love that.

I love that because it's the age old thing, especially like in athletics, hear like people rise to the level of the expectation. And if somebody kind of panders to you not knowing what you're doing, then you won't bother to figure it out as hard. It's just human nature.

chrisparks22 (09:26)
Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. So I just figured it out. I had some guidance, but a lot of it was taking the class and then trying to grab a little bit from it and go home and really think about it, position it on the instrument correctly, or figuring out a lot of different places to position it on the instrument. And just like that.

Jesse Paliotto (09:49)
What and then we should probably put a quick parenthetical comment. If you were going to explain what Barry Harris method is and what that means to a guitar player who had musician, let's just say musician doesn't need to be a guitar player who had never run into it before. How would you explain what it is? What's the elevator pitch for it other than go look at the Wikipedia?

chrisparks22 (10:05)
Well,

well, so I'll tell you what it's not. I'll tell you what it's not first. The first thing is it's not and this is probably my only pet peeve about the bear hair stuff, especially on on YouTube. It is not the bebop scale. It has nothing to do with that at all whatsoever. Zero. He doesn't even use that term ever. It is also not just

the major sixth diminished scale or the major scale with that extra note. It is not that. He has two very distinct ways of looking at things, which is why he broke his classes up the way he did. So, for instance, when you went to a to a workshop, it was broken up into three classes. The first was the harmony class or the piano class that he would call it. So the pianist would all be sitting around and he'd be telling him to do something. And then the guitar.

would kind of be the brave ones would be like around the outside to see if they could grab something, you know, and once in a while he'd pay attention to us. But for the most part, you had to just try to figure out what they were doing, you know. That was the harmony class. Now in that class, he talked about his way of looking at harmony. So just chord him. I'm not talking about soloing, just chording. And in his philosophy of harmony,

Jesse Paliotto (11:04)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (11:31)
He doesn't believe in chords. There's no such thing as a chord. Every chord belongs to a scale of chords, one or more scales of chords. And they're either major sixth diminished, minor sixth diminished, dominant seventh diminished, dominant seventh flat five diminished. He has four scales of chords. Now that's what they talked about in harmony class. Then the singer's class would happen. And the singer's class was, there'd be like 60,

Jesse Paliotto (11:37)
Interesting. Okay.

chrisparks22 (12:01)
singers and he would take a standard. A lot of times it wasn't a very known standard too, it was kind of a more obscure one which was great because there are a lot of beautiful obscure standards also. And then he'd give everybody a chance to sing it. So they'd line up in their key. So he'd say, okay, all the Gs here, all the A flats here, all the B flats here. And then if you were with the rhythm section, you had a chance to kind of learn that tune and then be able to really transpose it to different keys quickly.

because everybody was doing it different key, so you could figure out different places to play it, if you chose. So that was the second class. Then the third class was the horn player class, or the soloing class. He used to call it the horn class. And that's where he would discuss his concepts of soloing, which were completely separate to his four scales of chords.

except there was a little overlap when talking about soloing over minor. But for the most part, his concepts of soloing were using seven note scales, not eight note scales, but from the seven note scales, it's primarily dominant scale, major scale, and then on a minor scale, he would talk about minor sixth diminished scale. That's the one little spot where he would talk about that.

He would also talk about other scales like the whole tone scale, harmonic minor scale, and things like that. But primarily, those were the three scales that we worked on. Major scale, dominant scale, and minor six diminished scale. And then he had this beautiful way, completely unique way, totally, the only person I ever heard do this, is he would take a song, and our way of learning a song was he would give us a scale outline to the song. So single note outline.

where you played certain scales for a certain length of time and you got to feel the form of a song. It was such a brilliant, it was so brilliant. I had never heard anybody else, still I haven't heard anybody else. Anybody who's doing it now, it's Barry Harris. That's a Barry Harris thing, 100%. And it was within that one six or seven hour period of learning.

Jesse Paliotto (13:57)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (14:17)
You learned so much about music, man. I can't even tell you. Like, so much about music, it was all there. Now, obviously, it's just, it was enormous, you know, like so much stuff to work on. So for me, who's not a particularly fast learner, I was not like one of those people, like a class, I'm sure, Jesse, you've been around these people where like,

Jesse Paliotto (14:25)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (14:42)
just super brilliant musical people that can like pick stuff up super fast, you know, like, and there was all I exactly me too. I hate them. I hate them. And there were always, there were so many people like that embarrassed class. So instead of me just getting frustrated that I'm not that I just said, okay, well I still love this stuff. I'm just going to pick out a couple of things every class and try to really work on those things and strengthen.

Jesse Paliotto (14:47)
I hate them, they're disgusting.

chrisparks22 (15:10)
and just get better at each one of those smaller things. So that's what I did. I wasn't one of those people that picks stuff up fast. It still takes a while to really work on the stuff, but I enjoy it, so it doesn't seem like a big deal.

Jesse Paliotto (15:23)
Is that what

the YouTube videos, is that what they are? Is your weekly takeaways from those Saturday sessions? I think they were Saturday.

chrisparks22 (15:30)
no,

well, no, those were just the YouTube videos are basically the reason that the YouTube videos started in the first place was because my wife convinced me. She said, you know, you've been going to Barry for so long. You have all these thoughts about his stuff. You should really share it with people because there are other people that aren't able for geographic reasons to get to his class. So I started sharing them. That was the only, and they were just little snippets.

of things that he has a specific way of talking about. So that's why I decided to do that. It wasn't necessarily what we were working on that week. Because what happens in Barrett's classes, you do hear him repeat things. But you realize every time he repeats the same thing, it means something a little deeper to you on your instrument. you're like, that's what he's been talking about. Like he has this whole.

He has this whole concept, this creation theory, which I was able to recite within the first six months of studying with him. But it didn't mean anything to me musically. It meant nothing. It was just like some words that I was reciting. But now, even in this point in my life, it's so great. It's just such a beautiful way to look at how harmony works and where we get things and where things come from. See, Barry, I feel like the thing that made Barry

particularly great was he gave you the why. There was always a why. It wasn't just like, do this thing. There was always a reason behind it, a musical reason behind it. So there's no argument. It's like, OK, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Jesse Paliotto (16:59)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Well, it

also means you can extrapolate then, right? If you kind of know the principle, then that allows you to apply it in other situations. And with music, I mean, that goes on forever, the number of situations that things kind of express themselves. So I started to ask this like a couple minutes when we first started, because I know one of my...

chrisparks22 (17:17)
Yeah?

Mm-hmm.

This is

the

Jesse Paliotto (17:36)
Struggles I watched some of your videos on YouTube. I've gone through some of this stuff I've done the scales where you you know do a blues, but you're doing it based on playing scales rather than playing the chords But I know one of the things I've processed and I asked because I imagine other people do too when they encounter this is Is this how do I integrate it with my previous approaches? Is it a conflict? Is it like I've got if I'm taking a standard am I switching in my head between? Like I've looked at Joe pass stuff some and he tends to kind of think in terms of grips and scales

And I go, do I do that? But then I want to do some passing chords. So then I turn on the Barry Harris part of my brain to think in terms of using diminished to move between chords. Or is it just you just soak in it and one day you it's like learning a language. You wake up dreaming Spanish one day and you're like, I get it. Like, like, how do I integrate it? I don't know that's an odd question, but I'd love to hear what you think.

chrisparks22 (18:20)
It's not

it's not it's very common so it's hard from it's hard for me to put myself in your shoes or somebody else who's asking that because I didn't come from Knowing all this other stuff and then just accepting this but what I will say is it's The whole concept of especially if you're if we're just talking about harmonically

Jesse Paliotto (18:49)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (18:49)
The

whole concept of accepting that there is no such thing as chords, that every chord belongs to a scale, is a very hard thing to digest, right? It's not easy for people to take. But the more that you gradually accept that, the more you realize, then I'm free to do a lot of these things if I understand.

Jesse Paliotto (19:00)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (19:14)
the sixth diminished or the minor sixth diminished or dominant seventh diminished or dominant seventh flat five diminished. It's kind of hard to explain without actually looking at it. But if you take,

Jesse Paliotto (19:20)
No.

chrisparks22 (19:28)
The first thing you could think of is every minor 7 is a major 6. Every minor 7 is a major 6. So if we take a D minor 7, we find the major 6 by going a minor 3rd above that. So that would be F major 6. Now that D minor 7 belongs to a scale. The scale that it belongs to is the F major 6 diminished scale.

Jesse Paliotto (19:36)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

chrisparks22 (19:57)
Now, even though you were saying before, it's got passing diminishes in between. So F major 6 and G diminished, F major 6, G diminished, and so on. But it's so much more than that. It's so much more than that. those are the notes that you use to make all sorts of beautiful chords that

Jesse Paliotto (20:11)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (20:21)
from borrowing notes, from diminished, from using all sorts of things. So if you just take just a simple thing like a D minor seven and you think to yourself, wow, that belongs to this eight note scale, this F major six diminished scale. And what does that mean for me? And then that's also what fuels you to practice more things. So it's like it feeds off itself. So if you say, all right, well, D minor seven is really F major six. OK, so I'm going to get my F major six diminished.

scale i'll be able to do all those with and and that's why people say refer to the passing courts most of time because that's all they know how to do with it is just put a diminished in between and there's nothing wrong with that but that's one

Jesse Paliotto (21:01)
It's very

much taking your scalar mindset and like re-putting it back into a chord vocabulary. You're like, there's passing chords. There's these other chords I could use as opposed to thinking in terms of a scale base. But I interrupted where you were going with that.

chrisparks22 (21:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, right. Right. No,

no, no, that's right. No, you're 100 percent right. You're 100 percent right. The other thing is a lot of people just say, well, it's just if you take a D minor seven diminished scale or F major six diminished scale, it's just playing one five, one five over and over again. It's like playing the D minor seven and then the A seven, the D minor. Or it's just like playing F major six. It's so much more than that, man.

It's so much more than that. And that's why, you know, like, so you asked me in the beginning, like, give me a pitch as to like what the Barry Harris thing is. Oh, man. The only pitch I could give it is it's everything. It's everything. It's just that there's no there's no like cutesy way to frame it. I know like in YouTube in the YouTube world, there's a lot of people that you're trying to.

Jesse Paliotto (21:54)
Yeah, yeah.

chrisparks22 (22:06)
You have a 10 minute video, so you're trying to make it about this one particular thing. But it actually, it really does it. It's almost a disservice to just say it's just this or it's just that. That's like one of the billion things you can do with it. It's just, it's so unbelievable. And he's the only one who thinks of harmony like this. There's nobody else that thinks of harmony like this. I've never seen anybody else think of harmony like this. Never.

Jesse Paliotto (22:20)
only.

chrisparks22 (22:35)
And he also and I'll just going to finish by saying he he also. This is the other great thing, because there are also. I mean, I consider myself a good teacher at this point. I'm getting I'm getting better at it, you because of all the reps that I'm doing with it. So I'm becoming better at it, you know. But the thing that Barry had was Barry was a. Master level player. Forget about teaching.

Jesse Paliotto (22:35)
I feel like...

Yeah, yeah,

Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (23:03)
If he didn't teach

Jesse Paliotto (23:04)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (23:04)
anything, it wouldn't even touch the fact that his playing is on such a master level that it's remarkable. But on top of that, he decided to share all this stuff with us for basically, for virtually nothing. You know, the first class that I attended, do know how much the class was?

Jesse Paliotto (23:26)
I think I do because somebody mentioned this as a legend of Barry Harris thing. Is it 10 bucks?

chrisparks22 (23:31)
It was seven. My first class, my first class was in 1993. Okay. It was at, are you, where are you from, Jesse? Oh, so you're in the, okay. So if you've ever been to New York though, there's a famous street, 48th street, which has all the, used to have all the music stores like Manny's, Sam Ash, all the big Rudy's music was there. So there's a famous horn.

Jesse Paliotto (23:33)
So.

I'm in the LA area, so not very familiar with the New York locales.

chrisparks22 (24:00)
shop there called Rod Baltimore's Woodwinds and Brass. And at six o'clock, all those stores closed down and then Barry's class would start at that place upstairs. It was upstairs. So and it was from six o'clock at night till like a lot of times it went to like one o'clock in the morning. So between those times and it was Mondays and Tuesdays. But you'd show up. Yeah. No, it's OK. So you'd show up. You'd pay.

Jesse Paliotto (24:21)
okay. For some reason I thought it was Saturdays, but okay.

chrisparks22 (24:27)
your seven bucks to Richard at the time Richard was running the thing and then you could stay all night or you could go back grab something to eat come back you know still stay so seven bucks so I just I just told that story just to say look at how generous he was with giving that and then by the way so you could go you could go on a Monday or Tuesday right and then he would have a short class if he was working the Vanguard

And then you could just go downtown to the Village Vanguard and hear him putting all this stuff into real time. And he wasn't one of those teachers where he would tell you something, and then when you'd hear him play, you're like, wait, that's not quite the thing. You'd hear the exact thing, but you would just hear it put in a spot.

Jesse Paliotto (25:11)
Yeah.

Yeah,

chrisparks22 (25:25)
That's like the highest level. Just remarkable. It's not an overstatement. It was remarkable to watch him do it and listen to him do it in real time. it was like, can't make it. We can't.

minimize it into something like, it's just this chord to this chord or something. It's everything. It's everything.

Jesse Paliotto (25:59)
Yeah, it opens

up a lot of in my kind of limited exposure or engagement. It opens up a lot of fluidity. So like what was occurring to me a few paragraphs back was that. I feel like a lot of for myself and kind of what I encounter from other people online and stuff, is you kind of get to a place if you come from more of a standard, learn your chords and scales mindset where you start thinking of soloing and you think of jazz and stuff in terms of tone centers, and then you start to think in terms of like chord extensions. And so guitar players will talk about like.

chrisparks22 (26:07)
Thank

Jesse Paliotto (26:29)
on like a D minor flat five, there's these other chord tones around it you can embellish and do stuff. But I feel like that's, it's like if there's the train digging from London and the one digging from France and they meet in the middle and create the channel, like that's digging from one side. It feels like Harris is coming from the other side of saying, don't even start with the chords, just start with all the scales that make up the available tones in this thing. And that because

Apologies if I'm skipping around a lot, I connect that with some of the videos I've seen you do where you talk about borrowing from some of the diminished to put them into another chord and you're almost like kind of creating these malleable chord shapes or expressions based on the available tones in that scale. Is that making sense or am I talking too much?

chrisparks22 (27:03)
where you look like... Yes, that does make sense, Yeah,

but so I would say for the soloing thing, see, I never heard any terms like tonal centers. I never heard all that stuff. It wasn't until I started watching like music stuff online where I was like, geez, what does that even mean? Like I never heard him. He never used the...

Jesse Paliotto (27:24)
and

chrisparks22 (27:33)
Think about this, Jesse. He never used the word chord tones. He never used that. That's not something... Every one of them teach that. He never talked about that. He never talked about that. Never. Every... If you take...

Jesse Paliotto (27:39)
Which feels like fundamental to how most music teachers teach music, I think. I think. Yeah. Yeah.

chrisparks22 (27:55)
If you take a G7 scale and you're thinking soloing, every one of those notes is equally important. It's not just like, on a G7 scale, have to think our chordal tones are G, B, D, and F. That's not a thing. That was never a thing.

Jesse Paliotto (28:11)
which is mind blowing because

every rock country guitar player thinks in terms of like home notes and where am I gonna land for the safe note at the end of the phrase and so you gotta know your chord tones and that's that is the framework.

chrisparks22 (28:21)
Yes,

I didn't. never learned that. I'm just going to be honest. I never learned that. I never learned that. There was nothing about that ever. It was just learning pretty ways to play a G7 from every degree. Every degree was equal. And then if you got a little fancier, you started to learn that G7 had a tritone that we had to learn to D flat seven. So anything we learned on G7, we had to learn on D flat seven to.

Jesse Paliotto (28:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

chrisparks22 (28:49)
And the same concept is true of that. There was no like, let's play the root third and the fifth and the flat seven to the D flat seven. And if we wanted to hit another term, you never extension. I never used that term. Never. I never heard him use that term. I was around him for almost 30 years. I never heard him say that. Never.

Jesse Paliotto (29:00)
huh. Yeah.

And I, the way that it strikes me just hearing you describe stuff, it's very freeing. It feels like it just opens up, you know, not to be dramatic about it, but vistas of options that are exciting. Like that actually feels very open to me and amazing.

chrisparks22 (29:18)
It's just a massive amount.

I, you know, like I said before, it's hard for me to think of it in a different way to, so to come from your perspective because you learned in a different way. I was lucky enough. just learned strictly this way. So it's, it to me, it's very, it's very easy just to look at it like that and to think about like, whenever I hear those chord tone things and those things, I think you're putting added layers of,

It really does. You're putting added layers of difficulty on something that doesn't have to be there. And you know, part of it is, I do think, and Barry was a believer in this too, because he talked about it, that, you know, it became an industry. So teaching jazz in music school became an industry. It's a whole industry. So you had to come up with something to teach. So you came up with a whole bunch of different names for things and made things, probably made things overly complicated because you had to

Jesse Paliotto (30:07)
Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (30:21)
You know, so that, now I'm not sure that that's what happened, but it sure seems to me that that's a good explanation of probably what happened. But I don't know, I never went to music school. I didn't study at any of the big music schools or anything like that. So I don't know. But it seems that those were just terms that people came up with because you were trying to figure out a way for a professor to sell his book.

to his students or whatever, and to figure out a bunch of different ways to say basically the same thing.

Jesse Paliotto (30:53)
Yeah, I similarly don't know, but I will say last week I went to NAMM, which is the big music convention down in... No, I didn't know they were there. No.

chrisparks22 (31:02)
that's great, man. Did you see the open studio guys there? Did you get to see them? Yeah, Adam was there, Bob was there,

Caleb was there, Andy was there, and I think the transcriber Max was there too. you didn't see them? okay, okay.

Jesse Paliotto (31:17)
was down for one day on Thursday. I wish I would have known to figure out a way to kind of get a couple minutes with them. That would have been cool. But the thought I had, you know, is everybody working in the music companies are musicians. The unfortunate truth is one of the least effective ways to make money as a musician is by actually making music. Making products for music is a much more dependable way.

chrisparks22 (31:24)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (31:43)
Making teaching I can imagine is another way and so, know, I don't know firsthand from what Barry was saying But it doesn't doesn't strike me as wrong Yeah, cuz it's just you could tell everybody in the booths like these guys these are people that are they do this because they love it But this is the way they have make a job out of it and respect for that totally

chrisparks22 (31:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (32:05)
I wanted to push back or not push back but just tease a little bit apart a phrase that you've said a couple times around Berryhurst. There are no I'm gonna get this wrong. There's no such thing as chords there's scales of chords. I think that's what you said which for some reason is not I'm like wait so there is chords there's just scales of them like can you just tease apart what does it mean that no chords is it just scales and the of chords doesn't really you can delete that.

chrisparks22 (32:06)
We're gonna be with you.

Yep.

freeze.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (32:35)
I love it. Bring the demo.

chrisparks22 (32:42)
So, for instance, we said this D minor 7, which is obviously a common... Can you hear this okay? Okay, so that's a common chord that everybody plays, right? But if you know that this chord is actually just an inversion of this F6, and so you have to know all your F6s. But more important, it comes from this scale.

which is his eight note scale of F6. So now if I know if I have a D minor seven and a G7 going to a C major, let's say, that's a very common move for everybody. But see, if I know that this D minor seven comes from this scale, that means I can do a lot of things with it. I can do the typical borrow, which people do these kinds of things all the time.

Jesse Paliotto (33:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, too far.

chrisparks22 (33:37)
But you know, like a lot of times an explanation of this would be, well, you're just suspending the D minor 7. No, I'm borrowing, I'm using one of the scale tones of the sixth and eighth. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (33:45)
That's where my head was at earlier with saying that, like,

you come from the mindset I got trained in, you start to think in that, in terms of I'm doing extensions, I'm grabbing stuff to embellish my chord structures, but really you're stair-stepping into Barry's world, I think.

chrisparks22 (33:52)
Yes

Yep.

But that doesn't just mean I could say, which is obviously going from diminished to the sixth, it diminishes it. That's just one of the little pretty things that you could do. Look, look at this, man. You could do this so many different ways that you could look at it. You could look at it where now all this stuff. That's a beautiful way to play a two five and that's all.

Look at this chord. Now you hear that chord? What the hell would you even call that chord? Now, if I was going to try to call this something, right? I would say, it's a D minor seven with a raised five, a major seven and a nine. So D minor major seven raised five with a nine or D minor major seven nine slash flat 13 or something.

Jesse Paliotto (34:29)
You

chrisparks22 (34:56)
That's the dumbest thing in the world. Where meanwhile, you know what Barry would call this chord? You know what Barry would call this chord? He would call this F6 with three borrowed notes. These are the borrowed notes, those are the diminished notes, see? And these are so pretty. You hear what that brings in? That brings in so many pretty things, man. This is the thing. So it's not just like diminished to this, diminished to this. That's one little thing that you can do. We call that parallel.

where all the notes are moving in the same direction. But then you also have all this pretty contrary motion stuff.

If you know how to move stuff around, now I'm creating movement. I'm not just playing this stagnant chord to this stagnant chord, and then I'm thinking about, you know, like all the different pretty sounds, like everybody plays D minor 9, which is a pretty chord, but all that is is just that's F6 with one borrowed note. See, but if I know this, I could say, that's a beautiful move.

See, now I'm creating a move. It's almost like with these scales, you know, like you listen to like old Sinatra recording where he's got these beautiful strings behind him that are doing all these pretty moves. That's what harmony can be. See, and the thing about it is if we're really going to be honest as guitarists, right? We all sound completely unique when it comes to soloing. Like everybody sounds totally different.

But for some reason, when we play chords, we all sound exactly alike. Why is that? That's the dumbest thing in the world. That should never be the case. There's so many things that we should be able to do with chords. But see, if you're stuck in the mindset of it's just this chord to this chord, and this chord, sometimes I add a ninth, and then this chord, sometimes I add a flat nine, and this chord.

But if you think of it as scales and you learn little pretty things to do on the scale, it's limitless. Now you create movement all the time. You can make the simplest of things into something beautiful. The simplest of things. That's just a regular two-five. But see, the simplest of things now becomes a potential for you to create something beautiful with it. Not just...

Jesse Paliotto (37:26)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (37:26)
play these same stagnant chords. So that's always the issue that I've had generally with guitar players in general is that we all, and I put myself in the category also, I'm not above it, is that when we solo, we all sound different. But yet when we comp, we all play the same thing. Why is that? That's ridiculous. We shouldn't do that. We should never do that. The world of music is much too big for that.

much too big for that. shouldn't be doing that. And we shouldn't be content to do it. You know, we shouldn't be content to do it. That should be our motivation to say, I got to figure out a different way to get around this playing the same D minor seven and G seven I do every time. You know, I don't want to do that. But that's why if you think of these things as scale, see, this is a scale. See that? This is so pretty,

That's a beautiful way to play a 2-5. Or I might say the same thing on D-7, and instead of G7, I know another scale.

Jesse Paliotto (38:27)
beautiful.

chrisparks22 (38:34)
See, I know a whole bunch of scales that go into G7. I know a whole bunch of scales that go into G7. So that's what I mean by if you see a chord, you don't think of it just as a chord. You think of it as four notes that belong to one or more of these eight note scales. And it frees you up. It frees you up. Now, his single note stuff though, is almost in a way different.

Jesse Paliotto (38:54)
Yeah, yeah.

chrisparks22 (39:03)
I mean simpler. His single note stuff is simple. It's actually much more simple, much more to the point, but not easy. Because when you start to see all the different things you're supposed to know how to do on a scale, you realize like, oh, I don't really know this scale. So for instance, I studied with Barry for, well, since 93 up until he died, I took the last, you know, he taught, he died on December 8th, right?

At the time he was doing, because it was during COVID, he was doing those online classes.

Jesse Paliotto (39:40)
Mm-hmm, like Zoom or whatever.

chrisparks22 (39:42)
But yeah, from his house. Did you ever take one of those? Did you get a chance to take one of those? Those were awesome. my God, they were awesome. And, you know, because he still was, you he was he was not healthy and his is, you know, he was still like it was hard for him to get to the piano and play, but still his mind was so sharp. But in those classes, he really showed you all these little you realize like.

Jesse Paliotto (39:44)
No, I wish I was not not hip.

chrisparks22 (40:11)
I said, I remember saying to myself, I still say it to myself is that, man, I still don't know how to play G7. Cause there's just so many things. There's so many things that you have to know. There's so many things. It's also limitless. Now that's just his single note approach, which is also completely unique. And see, sometimes people get those two things mixed up, like the bebop scale and his descending half step rules.

But he came up with so many other things besides descending half step rules. He came up with a chromatic scale that he uses. And he came up with that in the 90s, the late 90s. So he was in his 60s. And he was still coming up with different beautiful ways to look at things. I mean, it's just amazing.

Jesse Paliotto (41:00)
So I have to admit,

the single note stuff is where I sort of foundered as I was going through some of your videos and exploring stuff. And because it felt, there was just so much. trying to take in all the different rules and approaches and really internalize it. But maybe that's just what it is. It's just a lot of work and you gotta put the time in and that's how it works.

chrisparks22 (41:24)
Correct.

It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So what it is is it's just a couple of things. He has his own particular language, the way that he calls certain things. So for instance, most people, when you play something like this, they call this arpeggio. See, in Barry's world, this is not an arpeggio. This is a chord. He calls that a chord. So he starts off with you play the scale, then you have to play the scale in thirds, which is

Jesse Paliotto (41:46)
huh,

chrisparks22 (41:52)
playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes. So that makes sense. You have to do that up the scale. Then you also have to know triads, which is the same method, playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes. Now you add a third one. So that's triads. You have to know those. Then you have to know chords, four note chords. So that's the same concept. Playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes, skipping notes, playing notes. So now you have four. So you have to know those up the scale. All these kind of things, up and down.

Then he starts you doing things with half step below the first note. So that's half step below thirds, half step below triad. Now, all of these things that you practice on the scale, you use them when you solo. That was the other beautiful thing about Barry. You know how, well, you probably know this, Jesse, because you're a guitar player. You know how many guitar players get you to practice things just because it's a

They want you to get used to playing a certain thing physically, but it's not musical at all. Like, you know, these dumb, you know, these dumb things. you, did you ever do any of these, these exercises? Like those are the, listen, don't ever do those again, man. I'm telling you right now, you know, cause you know why there are so many other things that you could be doing that are musical.

Jesse Paliotto (43:10)
I love this.

chrisparks22 (43:16)
That is not musical. There's nothing musical about that at all. You're never gonna do that in your life. Never are you gonna play that. But if I said to you, man, start off on, let's do triads up from G7, but I want you to start on the first note, go a half step below and then go back up to it and then go up to triad. So say, so now that's something to practice. That's musical. See? And then if I'm playing a song and if I say,

I'll use that. I'll use that.

I'll use that, you see, that's a musical thing. But that's what also was great about Barry. There was no filler. Everything you practice on a scale, you're like, yeah, I can use that. And then you know what else is brilliant? You'd be listening to Sonny Rollins and you're like, yeah, he knows that too. Sonny Rollins, yeah, Sonny Rollins knows his triads. That's awesome. And like that, but that's how Barry came up with these concepts is,

Jesse Paliotto (44:16)
Yeah, he's doing it.

chrisparks22 (44:27)
He took the text, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, all of them, and said, this is what we have to be able to do. This is what you have to be able to do. And then he took the text and he said, let me find little pretty ways to explain it. So that's what he did. Just brilliant.

Jesse Paliotto (44:44)
I love it.

It's funny you mentioned that about the exercises and sort of like doing things that are non-musical. just read this thing. I'll drop a link in the show notes and I'll email it over to you. But it was Satriani in some interview recently basically saying like when you listen to Jimi Hendrix, you never hear any artificial practice routines in what he's playing. It's all very soulful. It's like he's playing pure music as opposed to I think Satriani was sort of lamenting or like sort of the social media world where

you you got 30 seconds to just blaze through some scales to kind of look cool and look like, you know, how you to play, but total same point that you're making. But that leads me into like a big question, which is how do you have any, what's your advice on how to practice this? Like, how do I actually do this day to day? There's so much I could do. How do I do it?

chrisparks22 (45:34)
Well, the first thing I would say is this is where I feel like I can be an expert at it because nobody's going to be slower than me at picking this stuff up. Believe me. So I can talk with authority about this because it took me a long time. But I was also overwhelmed because there's so many things to practice. What you have to get good at is saying I'm going to you have to be disciplined in saying I'm going to take this little small thing.

whatever it is, like, have to, I haven't learned pivots. I have to learn pivots everywhere. So no matter what note I'm on, I can, I can throw them in. I should know a pivot every place on any scale I'm talking about. That's just a small thing, right? A pivot, Barrie's concept of this thing called, that he calls a pivot. So you just practice that because if you start adding that to your playing, that's huge. That's already huge.

So now maybe you add a thing where you say, OK, I'm going to do the thing where I'll do a chord up. And then after I do the chord up, or maybe I'll do a triad up. And then I'll do a pivot. Wow. Now I have two things I just put together. Be ba do ba de ba do de. That's nice. Now I make some. I'll do that from every degree of the scale and see what happens. So that's taking a small thing and just saying, I'm just going to practice this small thing.

That's it. I'm not going to move any further. I'm not going to get, you know, start to think, instead of this, I should practice this. The discipline comes with just staying focused on a smaller thing. To me, that was where my discipline had to come in. Saying, do I have the, yeah, do I have the ability to just sit and work on this one little small thing? Because you know what the truth is? The truth is, I've said this before, but the truth is,

Jesse Paliotto (47:18)
Man, that's a great quote.

chrisparks22 (47:30)
I was practicing all these smaller things with the hopes that once Barry was talking about the bigger things, I'd be all over it. And the truth is, he never talked about bigger things. It's always these little small things, but then it's these small things that are connected, you see, to then make this what looks like a bigger thing, but the bigger thing is still composed of those little small things that you have to practice. And what's great about it is,

You either know them or you don't. That's it. So if he said, play your scale up and down and then you're doing it in unison with the class, you know if you're not doing it right. You know if you're the one that's slowing every, you know, everything up and that doesn't sound good. He says, okay, play the scale in thirds and then everybody's doing it thirds like this, like totally perfect in time. If you don't know it, you don't know it. That's it. There's no lying about it.

There's no kidding yourself. Like, I know thirds. No, you don't. No, you don't. No, you don't. And that's the other thing about his class is that it gives you accountability. Like, man, I can't just come in here and be messing around. Or I can't just come in here and think I know something. There were so many things that I thought I knew that I don't

Jesse Paliotto (48:30)
There's no hiding.

Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (48:51)
I don't know anything about him, man. I'm telling you.

Jesse Paliotto (48:55)
It's one of the things about, I was talking with somebody recently with lessons, like online lessons are amazing because there's so much material that you have access to. But there's something about in-person situation that is about accountability.

chrisparks22 (49:04)
Hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (49:08)
Like I know that I had this when I had guitar lessons where you had to show up every week and you either looked like an idiot because you didn't practice it or you knew it and like that drove you to practice. At least it did for me and maybe everybody doesn't work the same, but I would work on it knowing something. I don't want to show up and look like an idiot or if you're you know if you're a kid and I don't waste my parents money or whatever. But like yeah the being able to like there's no hiding and then the other thing that makes me think of is. I was like John Wooden or some some old sports coach person just had some quote about is just fundamentals.

Fundamentals, fundamentals. Like there's no getting around. If you can just do the basics, you can play the game. There's no like fancy strategy that makes up for a lack of fundamentals.

chrisparks22 (49:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Correct. And that's why, you know, now that I'm over at Open Studio, I'm teaching classes there six days a week. And what's awesome is, oh, well, what I was going to say is just the classes themselves is it makes people accountable. So what's that? Because they're live. Exactly. I'll tell you, there's two things. They're live. And if you have your camera on, I'm going to call on you. That's it. Those are the two things.

Jesse Paliotto (49:55)
Yeah, talk about that. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, because they're Because they're live classes, right? Yeah.

chrisparks22 (50:17)
So when I first

Jesse Paliotto (50:17)
Fair warning.

chrisparks22 (50:18)
started teaching there, which is three or four years ago, they asked me to do a class and I did a master class, which was nice. And they asked me back and they asked me to be more a part of their community. So I started teaching one day a week and then two days a week and three days, blah, blah. Now I'm six days. I have different classes. I have one tonight. So, but the first thing that was different was I would call on people the same way. I mean, that's how I was taught.

So Barry would say do something, and then he would just randomly say tenor player in the back, do this. That's it, and then you'd have to do it. Yeah, so then you know how many times he's like, guitar player, do this, and then I'm like shaking, and then of course I play the absolute wrong thing, and then he would just stare at you like, why can't you get that? What is wrong with you? But that's Open Studio now.

Jesse Paliotto (50:52)
Terrifying,

Brutal. Brutal.

chrisparks22 (51:12)
And it's a little bit better because it's a Zoom class. You could obviously you don't have your sound on, so you could be practicing. It's mostly piano players. There's a bunch of guitar players too now, but there's piano players who are practicing before they get called on because they know they're going to get called on. So we take little parts of things that we work on little things all the time. Man, we have a blast. I love the community over there. We have such a blast. And it's because Peter Martin, who's the

You know, he's the founder and Adam Manus. They've made it into a community like this, where it's just there's all these people who have all the same interests, which is just to get better, to get better at their instrument, you know, and all the people that are basically there are all these like really accomplished people already. And they but they just want to get better at this one particular skill, you know, so it's great. We have a blast. We have a blast.

Jesse Paliotto (51:49)
Mm-hmm.

I loved, I may have mentioned this kind of before we started recording. I'll mention it again. I personally just benefited so much from the open studio platform. The podcast has been, it's like, you, if anybody's listening right now, go follow the open studio podcast. It's awesome. Those guys are so much fun.

chrisparks22 (52:28)
Yes, it's called you'll hear

it. It's called you'll hear it podcast and it's with Peter and Adam. It's it's so great. So what they'll do is for people who don't know, they'll they'll take just a discussion about one particular topic and they'll break it down and maybe they'll even play examples if it's something musical to talk about. But you might hear them talk about anything for an hour. You know, what's funny is

I thought to myself the first time I heard they had a podcast, thought like, well, I wonder how many people would be that interested in that. But it's just like, it's like people talking about sports. Like how much can you talk about this one game that just happened yesterday? Well, it turns out you can talk about it a lot. Can

I listen to it all the time. It became almost like sports radio for me, but something I listen to in the background. So if I'm cooking something or doing something, it's just... Well, first of all, it's two people who I really respect their opinion about things because I kind of know them. And so it's interesting to listen to them talk about stuff, different topics.

Jesse Paliotto (53:20)
Yes.

100%. I had the same experience. Like it was just on while I was driving places. And then the actual content like on the platform, just so much stuff that I got exposed to. And it's a very cool place. I will link to it all the notes and everything. But like a big, big plug for getting involved there for anybody who wants to pursue this, because it's a great, great place. Really love it.

chrisparks22 (53:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have a blast there, man. I'm so happy I'm a part of it. It's really terrific.

Jesse Paliotto (54:07)
I wanted to ask a couple more kind of technique questions if it's okay and we can not go too long with it.

chrisparks22 (54:14)
Man,

don't ask me anything about technique. am the, listen, I'm the wrong person to ask about technique. Never. Okay.

Jesse Paliotto (54:17)
No, sorry, okay, technique's the wrong word. Okay, not technique, guitar, guitars. I have seen,

was watching you on YouTube, I've seen you play everything from acoustic to solid body to archtop. Do you have a preference of like what you play or is it just kind of like, you omnivorous in terms of guitars? How does that work for you?

chrisparks22 (54:39)
So

you know what happened? There's this music store, it's called Lark Street Music, which is not far from me, it's like 20 minutes from me. And they happen to have a huge selection of very high-end instruments. So the owner in there is a very nice guy, he always lets me play different things. I was in there one day, it's a similar time that I had the conversation with my wife who was trying to convince me to start a YouTube channel about Barry.

Jesse Paliotto (54:54)
Okay.

chrisparks22 (55:09)
So I'm in there and I'm playing, have the head at the time of D'Angelico Archtop, the 18 inch, awesome. It's worth like $35,000, you know? So it's awesome, I get to play it. have no, you know, it's fantastic. The only thing I have to be careful is I don't wanna fall in love with it because. So I'm playing and it's on a Sunday.

Jesse Paliotto (55:28)
Right. It's going to break your heart.

chrisparks22 (55:34)
And there's a bunch of people in the store and the people are kind of walking past me and like practically knocking me over to get to the, but just no interest. But I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to cause a crowd or anything. But then I went over to the other side of his store. He has like telecasters and things like that. And there was an old telecaster he had. So I picked her up off the wall and I started playing literally the same thing. Same exact thing. All of a sudden there's a crowd formed around like, wow, what style is that? Like this is incredible.

because they had never heard a Fender Telecaster not play. You know, I guess they didn't know some of the great jazz artists that play Telecaster, but to them, a Telecaster is usually like rock or blues based. So here's this person playing all this stuff and you people are like, wow, you have such a, you know, that's such a unique sound. It's so great. I'm like, it's same thing. I was just playing over here, but it's just with a different guitar. So what I thought of is,

Jesse Paliotto (56:28)
Yeah.

chrisparks22 (56:33)
When I start my channel, I want to reach all the guitar players who, if they saw me with a big arch top, they wouldn't even click on my channel because they'd be like, no, that's jazz and I'm not interested in that. But now I have a telly and the stuff still sounds good. Because the thing about Barry's stuff is it's music. So even if you decide to play with a distortion pedal, you're still going to sound good.

Jesse Paliotto (56:38)
Mmm.

Yeah.

chrisparks22 (57:03)
Because a note, your choice of notes is what counts. It doesn't even make a difference. So I went through period where I was playing, you know, well, you've seen like the Telecaster, I had a Strat, I had an acoustic, what's that company, Loudon. I had a Loudon acoustic. And now I have my L5, which is what I, I love the L5. I love the older L5. So that's what I'm playing on now. But I'll probably get something different.

Jesse Paliotto (57:20)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

chrisparks22 (57:33)
But man, I sold all those guitars. I sold all those. What's that?

Jesse Paliotto (57:35)
What do you got? To

get the L5? Or how did that work?

chrisparks22 (57:40)
Well, because usually I buy one and then I sell it and then I buy one and I sell it. I'm not a collector. I'm not a person that has... Plus I don't have a lot of room for that. So I don't, you know, I don't really do this. So that's my guitar now. I have this and I have a Collings, their I-35, which is like their 335, Gibson 335. Yes, 335. It's their answer for it. It's beautiful. I love that guitar too.

Jesse Paliotto (58:06)
I have a like a possible, I'm flying to Austin next week for a business thing and Collings is based in Austin or outside Austin. And so I'm kind of like, have in my mind like maybe I should try and go by because they were just at NAMM and but you go to the booth and you can't hear anything. You can pick up some stuff, but it's too crazy. So I'm like, I might try and swing that next week to try their stuff.

chrisparks22 (58:13)
Yes. Yeah.

No. What

do you play? What's your main axe right now?

Jesse Paliotto (58:28)
I do have a telly I like kind of got convinced by Tim Lurch who does a lot of Telecaster jazz like tech school Honestly like the guitar I play every day I have a Larrabee D60 it's just a dreadnought and it is a It's my favorite guitar. It's just you sit down and it plays like butter. It's a little big for trying to do some of the more intricate fingerstyle stuff, so I've thought about getting like a

chrisparks22 (58:35)
Amazing. Amazing. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (58:56)
OM sized acoustic like a smaller acoustic body one. But I'm like you, I don't have a lot of room. don't get more of a minimalist. I'd rather have a couple of guitars. play a lot and that's it. So interesting.

chrisparks22 (59:03)
Thanks

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (59:10)
I also was curious about, okay, this is a bit of a technical question, but right hand, I think you kind of pick and do fingers like a hybrid thing. Do you have any strong opinions about what works, what doesn't, or what you've liked or not? It's just whatever you-

chrisparks22 (59:21)
Yeah.

Nope. have zero

strong opinions about. See, the only thing that I'll say is like, I don't think anybody's ever gone to my channel and watched any of my videos and thoughts themselves like, wow, I really like what he's doing, but there's just no way I could technically pull that off. Like, there's nobody that thinks of me in those terms. I'm just being honest, you know? So for instance, another

Jesse Paliotto (59:47)
Yeah,

Right.

chrisparks22 (59:53)
person that studied with Barry that's like a real genius is Pasquale Grasso. You know Pasquale? I mean, come on now. So here's the thing. If you only saw Pasquale and you thought, wow, that's the Barry Harris method, you'd be like, well, I can't learn that. That's the end of that because he's like an alien. He's like, I'm convinced. I'm convinced he has another finger here. So there's another one here. I'm convinced.

Jesse Paliotto (59:58)
Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

chrisparks22 (1:00:23)
You know, I met him a few times, you know, because at the time he overlapped with studying. He was living in Italy at the time, but then he came to New York and at the time he's come through. So the first time I met him was at this place. He was 250 West 65th Street, which is where Barry used to his class, which was like this. It was a gymnasium. So he had two pianos and this huge gymnasium. Yeah, that's what it was.

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:43)
wow.

That sounds like

a very auditorily difficult situation, but all right. Yeah.

chrisparks22 (1:00:50)
It was it was a little bit much. It was a little bit much.

But Barry was there. So that's where we were, you know. So was by Lincoln Center, not too far. And the first time I met him, he was sitting down. There's there's a little room before you get into the hallway before you get into the gymnasium. He was sitting there and he was playing note for note. The Amazing Bud Powell, the first side of the Amazing Bud Powell, no for no. Now, of course, I that that

recording that whole album I had on CD, but that was very dear to my heart. I love Bud Pal. And I'm listening to this person play it on my instrument, something that should not be played on my instrument. There's just no way. And if I told you that and you hadn't seen him, you would say, you must be making it up like, or you thought you've made it out to be bigger than it actually is. Nope, no, I did not. And now everybody gets to see him.

You get to see for yourself. But my point is if you see Pasquale, then you think to yourself, oh, if that's the Barry Harris method, I don't have a shot. I don't have a chance. I'm not.

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:57)
Yeah, right, because it's a little,

it's too much. It's not too much, it's just overwhelming.

chrisparks22 (1:02:02)
He has, in my mind, he has the greatest technique I've ever seen of jazz guitar player, period. That's it. I don't care what era you're talking about. I never saw anything like that. I've been in a room with him where I'm just, I'm stunned. I'm stunned. And he's a very sweet, the other thing about him is like, you you were talking about those people that learn things fast. He's one of those people, obviously.

Jesse Paliotto (1:02:12)
Mm-hmm.

yeah.

chrisparks22 (1:02:30)
So

I hate him on that level. And the other level that I hate him on is he's also a very sweet, humble, very nice person. And he has a... Yeah! It would be so much easier, you know? He also has a brother. You know, his brother, Luigi, plays alto, is also equally brilliant. Just, I don't know if you ever heard... Yes, crazy, crazy. So what Pasquale has done with Bud...

Jesse Paliotto (1:02:39)
I know, like, couldn't you be a jerk and then I could really hate you? But no. Yeah.

I ran it?

Really?

chrisparks22 (1:03:00)
Howe on the guitar. His brother knows every bird thing, anything you could possibly think of bird, even the most obscure things. He checked it all out. And obviously I'm not I'm not going to make him just about bird because he's done much more than that. But I mean, he's also just like his brother. They're incredible musicians, the both of them, you know, really terrific. Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:03:06)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's so cool. I ran

into Pazuali Grasso, I think from Samara Joy. He was, I think she must, she went to Grammy a couple years ago or something for like, and then so when I heard him, I'm like, wait, who's this guitar player that's just killing it as the, you know, comping chordal soloing instrument and then kind of got into his solo stuff and yeah, like everything you're saying. was just like, so I appreciate what you're saying. Like that's amazing, but it can create the sense of how do I get there?

chrisparks22 (1:03:32)
Yes, she did. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:03:52)
as my own guitar, from my own place as a guitar player. And so making things more approachable, making things more like, you don't have to have this perfect technique to play beautiful music. Like that's very cool. I appreciate that personally.

chrisparks22 (1:04:07)
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So if you watch the little examples that I give on my channel, you see they're very doable. There's nothing about it that's too difficult or that the average person, let's say if you're coming from a rock background and you just want to dip your feet in like checking out, well, what could jazz be or what are some courting things that I should learn how to do or whatever.

If you see it broken down into smaller things and they're more digestible where you're like, OK, I think I can handle that. Like I said, I'm not burning it up. I'm sure most people feel at least like they can accomplish it technically.

Jesse Paliotto (1:04:49)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I know we're kind of like a little over time. Thank you for just rolling with it. This has been so good to share, man. I guess one question that's worth just kind of hitting as we wrap up, where's the best place for people to follow your music, what you're doing? Open Studio we've talked about, so that's probably one of the big ones.

chrisparks22 (1:04:56)
No, it's okay,

Open Studio,

yeah, Open Studio, if you become a pro member, you get to take all the courses, all the live courses, and also get to watch all the pre-recorded courses, which are fantastic. And they have all sorts of deals, man, to become a pro member all the time. So just check in from time to time to see. But it is so worth it, because their level of teaching and all their teachers that they have are just incredible. One of the teachers that they have now

is this teacher named Thomas Echols, who I'm a huge fan of also, who I would suggest, Jesse, if you want to interview somebody else, he's a wonderful person. He's a YouTuber. And he's also a person that has followed Barry's harmonic approach to a T and has done wonderful things for our instrument to break it down to make it easier. He's a super interesting guy. Yeah, his name is Thomas Echols.

Jesse Paliotto (1:05:44)
Yeah.

awesome.

chrisparks22 (1:06:04)
He has a channel called Labyrinth of Limitations, which is wonderful. he's on board now. Yeah, he's crazy. He's crazy, crazy. Like, also so good. But he's funny because he's coming from a classical approach. So that's what I mean. As a finger player, see, you're going to see this, man. It'll mess you up. Because it'll change the way that you look at it. Because obviously, he's coming from that point of view as a classical.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:10)
I have run into that, yes. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

chrisparks22 (1:06:33)
musician. So what he did was he discovered Barry. He was, you know, he discovered Barry and then he came up with his own way of discussing it on our instrument that was so brilliant that I was completely taken by. And see, to me, I think he's the best one. I think he's the best one. I think he's the best one. So I strongly recommend checking him out for sure.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:45)
Yeah.

That's.

I will definitely

do that because you made a connection that I didn't really make very well with the question about right hand technique, which part of what I think was lurking in the background of my own mind was this idea that with finger picking or a finger style approach, you maybe have an opportunity with Barry's approach to think more like individual voices for the strings and like how you're doing independent movement and doing things, or maybe with an individual pick, you're kind of having to make some choices on what you play.

chrisparks22 (1:07:11)
Thank

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:28)
that maybe you can make some different choices. so different right hand technique may open up some possibilities is probably the question I should have asked that was lurking there, but thank you for that connection.

chrisparks22 (1:07:36)
No, that's

a perfect point too. Yes. Yep. I would agree with all of that. And that's why I think Thomson's way of looking at it is also beautiful.

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:48)
I'm gonna hit them up and tell them Chris sent me.

chrisparks22 (1:07:51)
Do that,

do that man, for sure, for sure, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:54)
Awesome. Well, let's let's go ahead and wrap it up for now. There's so many other things I would love to ask you Maybe we can do it at a future date though. I don't I don't want to pile it all in in one go here Thank you, Chris for being here. Thanks everyone else for joining us. I'm your host Jesse Polly out I love talking about making music here on the guitar journal Chris any final last words are good to go

chrisparks22 (1:08:13)
No, just thanks very much for inviting me, man, and good luck with this. I hope I wish you lot of success with this. It's going to be wonderful.

Jesse Paliotto (1:08:19)
Thanks.

I appreciate it, man. Well, cheers. Thanks everybody. Have a great day and catch you on the next one. Cheers.