Bio

Born & raised in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland and now living and creating on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia, Barry works across the music industry as a performer, accompanist, educator and consultant.

Hailed by Loudmouth Magazine as “one of Australia’s most inventive and accomplished composer/improvisers”, Barry’s work oscillates frequently between contemporary jazz, musical theatre, free improvisation and contemporary chamber & art music. Recent projects include a work for Sydney new music group Ensemble Offspring, an album of two-piano improvisations with Australian jazz luminary Judy Bailey OAM, and the Hammond organ trio Green Thumbs. His 2023 quartet album In the Waves features luminary drummer Eric Harland (USA) and saxophonist Will Vinson (USA/UK) and received widespread critical acclaim.

Barry’s “impressive multidimensional musical output” (JazzLife Japan) juxtaposes a lyrical melodicism with distinctly modern harmonic sensibility informed by his doctoral investigation of set theory as a resource for jazz composition and improvisation. His 2018 quartet release Blueprints & Vignettes typifies this juggling act, described as “…gripping…a dialogue between the concrete and the abstract…” (Sydney Morning Herald), and evoking “a sense of searching for a new beauty that much of the best 20th century classical music possesses” (AustralianJazz.net).

A sister album of compositions and improvisations for solo piano, Hatch (2018) was praised as “…exceptional…an impressive ability to improvise with intricate pitch structures and pianistic textures without ever sounding constrained by compositional parameters” (Loudmouth Magazine), and debuted in the top 10 on the Radio New Zealand Classical Music charts.

Since 2011, Barry has also played regularly in Japan in a now-longstanding partnership with drummer and tabla player Ko Omura. A 2019 tour with bassist Kosuke Ochiai led to the formation of the trio Polyglot and the debut album Talk, Vol. 1 - a collection of music acclaimed as “enticing the listener to a vision of lush nature, or one might relate to that feeling of looking out into the universe” (JazzLife Japan).

In 2016 Barry, Omura and saxophonist Dave Jackson undertook a week-long residency and album recording at the Joganji Buddhist temple in Osaka, Japan with the acclaimed koto player and experimental improviser Michiyo Yagi and bassist/cellist Takashi Sugawa. The resulting album, Joganji, reflects both the cross-cultural meeting of eastern and western traditions and the influence of local sites and sounds on improvised music making; sections of fragile minimalism evoke the monochrome landscape of the Japanese countryside in winter, while loud and chaotic periods reflect the equally comical and disturbing deities and masks of Japanese surrealism and theatre.

Orbiturtle’s 2014 eponymous debut release also features living legend of Japanese jazz Yoshio Suzuki on bass (formerly of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Stan Getz, among many others), with whom the group toured Japan in 2014 & 2015 and Australia in 2016.

As an improviser Barry has performed with a host of acclaimed international artists including Will Vinson, Jo Lawry, Jay Rodriquez, Mimi Jones, Camille Thurman, Joanna Wallfisch, John Hollenbeck, Theo Bleckmann, George Coleman Jr. and Arun Luthra (USA), Michiyo Yagi and Yoshio Suzuki (JPN).

Barry is the recipient of numerous awards, including an APRA Professional Development Award for Jazz, the Bell Award for Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year and a BBM Travel Scholarship.

Barry grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and began playing the piano at age 4. As a teenager he received the Most Outstanding Musician (2007), Best Pianist (2007), Best Keyboardist (2006, 2008), Best Composition (2008) and Band of Festival (2007, 2008) awards from the Tauranga International Jazz Festival Youth Competition. Relocating to Australia in 2009 to study at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Barry graduated with a Bachelor of Music (Jazz Performance) with First Class Honours in 2011.