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 between contemporary jazz, art music, cross-cultural practice and musical theatre.

His 2023 album In the Waves - featuring Eric Harland (USA) and Will Vinson (UK/USA) - received 4.5 stars in the Weekend Australian and was praised by the Sydney Morning Herald as “...the finest instalment to date of the pianist’s bristling musical intelligence, rhythmic mutability, melodic flair and compositional gifts.”

Since 2022 Barry has worked increasingly in Vietnam. A ongoing student exchange partnership between the University of Sydney and the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi resulted in the signing of an Memorandum of Understanding between the two schools in 2024 - with the goal of fostering further exchange in creative practice and education.

In parallel, a new ensemble featuring Vietnamese musicians Nguyen Thanh Thuy (dan bau), Ngo Tra My (dan tranh), Haong Phu Tung (drums/percussion) and fellow Sydney Conservatorium lecturer Hannah James (bass) resulted in performances at the opening of the Sydney Vietnam Institute in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and the recording of an album of improvisations exploring the meets points of jazz and Vietnamese traditional music.

As a composer, Barry’s “impressive multidimensional musical output” (JazzLife Japan) often juxtaposes a lyrical melodicism with distinctly modern harmonic sensibility, informed by a longstanding love affair with the intersection of jazz and art music. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2018 for an investigation of the applications of set theory and serial techniques to compositions for improvising musicians.

The resulting album Blueprints & Vignettes (2018) was praised by the Sydney Morning Herald as “…gripping…a dialogue between the concrete and the abstract…”, that evokes “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 performed regularly in Japan. A 2019 a tour with drummer/tabla player Ko Omura and 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). A follow up album is set for release in 2025.

In 2017 Barry undertook a week-long residency and album recording in 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. The project was made possible by a development grant from the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia).

In 2014, Barry recorded with acclaimed Japanese bassist Yoshio Suzuki (formerly of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Stan Getz, and newphew of the Suzuki method founder Shinichi Suzuki). A series of tours in Japan and Australia with Suzuki followed in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Barry has performed with a long list of jazz luminaries including Will Vinson, Jo Lawry, Jay Rodriquez, Mimi Jones, Camille Thurman, 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.