Barry Doyle Harris was born December 15, 1929, in Detroit, the fourth of five children; his mother, a church pianist, began giving him piano lessons at four. The turning point in his musical life came at seventeen, when he heard the seminal bebop record "Webb City," featuring Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, and Fats Navarro. As part of a generation of Detroit musicians who became crucial players in bebop's second wave, Harris worked through the late 1950s and early 1960s with Max Roach, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, as well as Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, and Cannonball and Nat Adderley.

He built an extensive solo career, releasing 25 albums under his own name across five decades. Beyond performing, Harris became one of jazz's most influential scholars and theoreticians, puzzling out the underlying structures and devices of bebop piano and translating them into rubrics that could be taught, studied, and replicated; aspects of his method eventually seeped into mainstream jazz education. His New York workshops became a fixture from the 1970s onward, including a five-year run from 1982 to 1987 at the Jazz Cultural Theater, which he co-founded.

Harris died December 8, 2021, one week shy of his 92nd birthday, of complications from COVID-19.

Harris's role as both a working bebop pianist and the music's most systematic teacher gave him a rare double legacy: a substantial recorded output in his own right, and a codified teaching method that shaped how bebop piano has been passed down to subsequent generations of musicians.