While you hunt for the patched PDF, you can start practicing the Intervallistic Concept right now using a simple "Brute Force" method. Eddie Harris called this "The Shuffle."
Exercise 1: The Interval Cycle (No Horn Required) Take a root note: C. Choose an interval: Minor 3rd (3 half-steps). Move up by that interval: C → Eb → Gb → A → C (octave). Now, reverse direction, but change the interval quality. This builds neural pathways between notes that ignore key signatures.
Exercise 2: The Broken PDF Workaround Assuming you have a corrupted PDF that only has text, look for the section titled "The 12 Tone Row minus 1." Harris believed that playing 11 of the 12 tones in strict interval order (alternating Major 2nds and Minor 7ths) creates the most "vocal" melodic line.
Write this out: C (root), D (Major 2nd), C (down Minor 7th? No—Harris’s rule: always change direction after a half-step). Just play this sequence on your instrument:
C - D - B - C# - Bb - A - G# - F# - G - F - E
Notice there is no scale. There is only distance. This is the Intervallistic Concept in a nutshell.
Rating: 4.5/5 (for the patched PDF) – 2.5/5 (for the original method) eddie harris intervallistic concept pdf patched
The Intervallistic Concept is not a method for learning jazz. It is a method for unlearning everything you thought you knew. Eddie Harris was trying to build a new instrument inside your brain, one where the fretboard or keys disappear and only pure distance between pitches remains.
The “patched” PDF is the first time this radical vision has been legible in the digital age. It is still incomplete, still maddeningly opaque, and still occasionally wrong (or “patched” to be right). But for the first time, you can actually read Harris’s handwritten confidence on page 42: “If you do this for 20 minutes a day, you will hear in colors. I am not joking.”
He wasn’t joking. And thanks to this meticulous restoration, a new generation of musicians can finally understand why.
Where to find it: The “patched” PDF is currently circulating on private theory forums, academic torrent trackers, and saxophone enthusiast Discord servers. It is not officially in print. Support the Harris estate if a legitimate reissue ever emerges—but until then, this patched edition is the closest we have to a definitive text.
Bottom line: Download it. Print it. Bind it in a red cover. Stare at the interval cycles until your eyes cross. Then put down the PDF, pick up your horn, and play a C to an E-flat. That’s not a minor third. According to Eddie Harris, that’s “the color of a setting sun over Lake Michigan.” Now you’re getting it.
In the dark corners of jazz theory forums and saxophone subreddits, a quiet rumor has persisted for years. It involves a genius, a lawsuit, a lost manuscript, and a specific string of search terms: "Eddie Harris Intervallistic Concept PDF patched." While you hunt for the patched PDF, you
For the uninitiated, this looks like tech support jargon. For the serious jazz musician, it represents the Holy Grail of improvisation tutorials—a document so revolutionary that its scarcity has turned the internet into a digital archaeological dig.
This article will explain what the Intervallistic Concept is, why every PDF copy online is broken, what a "patched" version entails, and—most importantly—how to actually apply Harris’s genius to your horn without relying on corrupted files.
Sometime in the early 2000s, a fan scanned a rare, original copy of The Intervallistic Concept—a thin, spiral-bound book published by Hip-Bone Music (Eddie’s own label). This PDF began circulating on Soulseek, Scribd, and private jazz trackers.
Here is the problem: **The book is dense with musical examples, diagrams, and "Interval Number Tables."
Due to low-quality scanning (300 DPI in the early 2000s), many copies are corrupted in three specific ways:
Hence the term "patched." Musicians aren't looking for software; they are looking for a human-repaired PDF—a version where someone has: In the dark corners of jazz theory forums
The request for a “patched PDF” reflects a broader problem: expensive, rare, or out-of-print educational materials drive musicians toward piracy. While understandable, this undermines jazz’s oral & written traditions. A better approach:
For decades, Eddie Harris was known as a paradox. To the casual jazz fan, he was the saxophonist who made the novelty hit “Exodus” and experimented with a Varitone amplified saxophone. To the serious musician, he was a deeper, more enigmatic figure—a true original whose 1970 album The Intervallistic Concept served as both a sonic manifesto and the gateway to a self-published, almost mythical method book of the same name.
For years, physical copies of the original 1970s Intervallistic Concept book (published by Ebony Productions, later by Third Eye Publishing) have been Holy Grail items, fetching hundreds of dollars on auction sites. The few available PDF scans were often nearly useless—riddled with missing pages, illegible fingering charts, and OCR errors that mangled Harris’s unique symbology. That has changed with the release (or leak, depending on your perspective) of the “patched” PDF, a meticulously restored digital edition that finally allows us to evaluate Harris’s system on its own radical terms.
This review will cover the content of the method itself, the quality of the “patched” restoration, and why this matters for modern improvisers.
The reason musicians often search for a "patched" or compiled version of this concept is that Harris’s original materials were dense and required a specific
To understand Eddie Harris’s concept, you must understand the context of jazz education in the 1970s and 80s. The dominant pedagogy was (and largely remains) "Chord-Scale Theory"—the idea that for every chord, there is a specific scale that fits (e.g., Cmaj7 = Ionian or Lydian).
Eddie Harris found this approach limiting. He believed it forced musicians into a vertical "linear" way of thinking (running scales up and down) that killed swing and melodic invention.
The Core Philosophy: Instead of thinking vertically (stacks of notes forming chords), Harris proposed thinking horizontally via intervals. He argued that any chord could be navigated not by its parent scale, but by the intervals created between the chord tones and the extensions.