PAULINE PROFILES
PLAYING IT “RIGHT”
Jazz and blues trombonist, bassist and band leader (Donald) Christopher Barber (1946-47) died as Atrium was going to print. He had finally retired in 2019 having led the Chris Barber Band through almost seven decades on the road. His role in bringing Black American blues artists to the UK sparked a musical tsunami that led to the birth of British rock and pop.
I
was watching Jools one night last October. The former member of the successful pop band Squeeze, now beloved Rhythm and Blues Orchestra bandleader and well-known host of Hootenanny was interviewing the legendary rock icon Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin. As is standard with Jools Holland’s format, he was asking Plant to name the most influential musicians in his life. One of his answers came as something of a shock – Chris Barber! How could a trombone-playing exponent of New Orleans 1920’s ‘traditional jazz’ possibly have influenced the life of a ‘rock god’? For the answer we have to go back to a teenage boy’s interest in and love of old jazz and blues recordings from the 1920’s. Chris Barber was to take a very different path from the one he seemed destined to follow when joining St Paul’s in the autumn of 1946 to study pure mathematics under Chris Heath (Master 1927-56). While a prep school boy at King Alfred School in Royston in Cambridgeshire, Chris would travel in to Cambridge each week for a violin lesson. He quickly realised that his bus fare allowance for the trip was the equivalent to the cost of a 78rpm jazz record. So, forsaking the bus for his bike, he was able to start acquiring records at the rate of one a week from Miller’s, a specialist record shop he enjoyed frequenting. Chris would persuade local lorry drivers to pull him along on his bike down the then uncongested roads to ease the effort of cycling the 14 miles there and back. In this way Chris started to acquire what would eventually become an extraordinary personal library of over 30,000 jazz and blues records that would come to influence the set lists of his future line-ups.
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ATRIUM
SPRING / SUMMER 2021
Photographs courtesy of Kate Barber
Simon Bishop (1962-65) reflects on Chris Barber’s musical legacy
Chris grew up listening to the music broadcast by the BBC during the war. Music While You Work was a moraleboosting programme aimed at working people, especially in factories, but there was little or no ‘jazz’ content other than the very occasional record to which he was instinctively drawn. Chris started to follow his interest in earnest, listening to programmes produced for the American Forces Network that featured American jazz musicians. He was inspired by finding a discarded copy of the book Really the Blues by 1920’s Chicago jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, which laid out the history of jazz and its roots – enough to make him want to track down recordings of the musicians that were mentioned. By the age of 15, Chris had already acquired almost seventy ‘78’s’. Once he returned to London, Chris often frequented Dobell’s bookshop at 77 Charing Cross Road which was later to become a hub for jazz record collectors, a small collection of fans that he described as being akin to a secret society! He would eagerly buy up books on jazz such as Rhythm on Record by Hilton Schleman and Charles Delauney’s Hot Discography. Chris asked a neighbour who frequently travelled back and forth to New York to bring back Bluenote and Mercury label recordings. But it would be a live concert given by the George Webb Dixielanders, organised by the Hot Club of London in 1946, that would leave such an impression on the young Barber that he would never be in doubt again about what it was he wanted to do. His early professional career as an actuary would merely prove to be a brief step in the wrong direction. Once his father had backed his interest in music and with the good fortune to be warmly welcomed into the