Hey everyone welcome back to the Nikhil Hogan Show, the show interviewing the best musicians in the world and what a treat today, I’m so thrilled to introduce my guest, Pianist, Composer, Arranger, and Teacher, Isaac Raz!
Isaac Raz holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Composition and Music Synthesis from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, and is a recipient of the Duke Ellington Award. He received his Master of Arts in Teaching degree in Music Education from Lehman College, Bronx, NY, and is a recipient of the Joseph Dellicarri fund award.
In 1993 he composed the musical score for the Emmy Award winning documentary film “Pioneer Women”. In 2000 Isaac worked with jazz record producer Teo Macero, playing keyboards and programming tracks for his “Impressions of Miles Davis” album featuring Vernon Reid, David Leibman, Lew Soloff, and Lincoln Goinnes. His arranging skills have been utilized on many pop music recordings, including Zomba Record’s gold selling R&B artist Joe. Isaac continues to work as a composer, creating music for film, TV, and educational applications. His Jazz and pop groups have played throughout the US and abroad featuring his own compositions as well as popular music of all styles.
In the NY Jazz scene, Isaac is an 8 year veteran of Barry Harris’ weekly tuesday workshop and a great proponent of Barry Harris’ method. He is the founder of Whole Music LLC, and runs a fast growing Youtube channel.
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2:07 What’s your musical background? 3:06 Do you have Absolute or Perfect Pitch? 3:57 What was your development like in Berklee leading up to the Barry Harris workshop? 5:26 Are you talking about chord scales and modes? 6:47 What was your first day like in the Barry Harris masterclass? 8:25 Do you remember your first interaction with Barry Harris? 9:45 What happened in that 2nd year of going to the workshop? 10:39 Talking about Barry Harris’s identity 12:02 Does he include hard bop in his style? 13:51 What about the criticism of Barry Harris that he’s old fashioned? 16:28 On there being a whole more music left for people to write 17:34 The breakdown of the 6 hour masterclass and the improvisation section of the class 20:17 How should we break up Cherokee into scales? 22:09 What scales do we need? What kinds of minor do we need to learn? 23:21 What about the major and minor 6th diminished scales? 23:59 Is that the same as the bebop scale? 26:06 Is it used more for a scale outline or for theory and harmony? 26:48 How does he break up a tune with different line building materials? 30:47 On Barry Harris’ method having close parallels with Partimento 31:26 Are you able to listen to the classic bebop recordings and break them down? 32:17 On the criticism that Barry Harris is a Bud Powell clone 33:17 The diminished genealogy and the 4 related dominants 35:29 Altering the diminished chord to get different chords 38:08 How would you use these chords out of the diminished chord? 40:13 Would you thrown in the Dominant Diminished scale with 2 bars of a dominant chord? 41:17 How do you use these scale of chords? 42:52 Taking Cherokee as an example 43:35 Talking about 6th chord rules 45:31 Is this a framework to looking at Harmony? 45:59 What does Barry Harris think of the hard bop pianists like Bobby Timmons and Sonny Clark? 47:25 Funny jive moment at the Barry Harris workshop 48:15 On Barry Harris’ Big Band compositions 53:07 How do you get good at Jazz? 56:12 Talking about discovering Partimento 57:46 On Barry Harris being impressed by Partimento 59:32 Wrapping Up