Eddie kept revising his PDF. He added diagrams showing how to treat rhythm as negative space, small pencil marks about dynamics that suggested “less is a muscle.” He began to include instructions for patching—how to route a breath sensor into a phase shifter, how to calibrate delay so it honored the interval rather than buried it. The PDF grew messy and human, full of cross-outs and recipes scrawled in spare hand.
Eddie Harris had always loved gaps.
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.
Unlocking the Eddie Harris Intervallistic Concept: A Deep Dive into the "Patched" PDF Method
Once you have a usable copy—whether a physical book or a clear PDF—how do you actually use it to transform your playing?
Instead of playing ascending or descending scales, the concept focuses on playing intervals—thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and octaves—in succession.
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.
If you’d like a (without infringing on Harris’s original text), I’m happy to write that for you. Just let me know.
The concept is typically divided into three volumes (often bundled into a single 321-page edition) that cover: