Chris Barber

PLAYING IT “RIGHT”

Simon Bishop (1962-65) reflects on Chris Barber’s musical legacy

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.

Photographs courtesy of Kate Barber

Iwas 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.

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

Guildhall School of Music as a trombonist and bass player, rather than as a violinist, for which there was a long list of applicants, his future was assured. Chris bought his first (second-hand) trombone in 1948, when he was 18.

For Chris, jazz and blues went hand in hand, “I don’t like to do one without the other. I couldn’t live with having a band and not having blues in it.” One of his earliest collaborators was fellow Pauline, guitarist Alexis Korner (1941-46). They had not known each other at School, as they were two years apart, but came together to form a band in 1949. Because of their joint interest in blues, they put together what must have been one of the earliest blues sets performed by British musicians, with a line-up that included two trumpets, piano, banjo and guitar. It is interesting to think of them both at St Paul’s in West Kensington at the same time – two of the most influential figures of British blues, R&B and rock, passing each other in the corridors completely oblivious to their entwined futures.

In Chris’s case, it was his particular love for American blues that led him to seek out seminal artists such as Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee with whom he played and befriended on his early tours to the States in the 1950’s. They were later encouraged to tour with him in the UK and Europe, sometimes at Chris’s band’s own expense when agents refused to cover costs for guest artists appearing in his concerts. It was exposure to these American ‘greats’ that would inspire early R&B and blues English bands such as the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and The Animals, Eric Clapton and The Yardbirds, Georgie Fame, Long John Baldry, Keith Emerson and many others.

Chris’s forays into skiffle, with Lonnie Donegan on banjo, formed the precursor to British Rock’n’Roll, with its roots bedded in the blues. In 1955, the record of Rock Island Line, featuring Chris on double bass, was an instant hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the UK and the States. The American folk and blues singer/guitarist Leadbelly had originally made a recording of the song in 1937 after hearing it performed by an Arkansas convict gang. Chris’s version is probably one of the earliest examples of a British recording influenced entirely by Black American roots music. Later in 1956, Monty Sunshine’s liquid clarinet voicings in Petite Fleur took the recording by the Chris Barber Band to number 3 in the UK charts and number 5 in the US, winning a Gold Disc for its sales of over a million copies.

Chris went on to collaborate with countless other musicians. Ottilie Patterson, the gravelly-voiced blues singer from Northern Ireland who later married Chris, lent enormous appeal to the band especially during their early live TV performances on the BBC’s Six Five Special. Van Morrison, Paul McCartney, Dr John, Mark Knopfler, Rory Gallagher, Jools Holland all played with him. Chris was also a founding director of the Marquee Club on Wardour Street where he pooled his music business experience with the club’s owner and jazz promoter, Harold Pendleton. As well as establishing the Marquee, the pair initiated the National Jazz & Blues Festival in 1961, which eventually grew into the Reading Festival. It would be amiss to not mention Chris’s other great passion – owning and driving stylish and fast cars. Lagondas and two LaSalle cars manufactured by Cadillac were amongst his prize possessions, as well as a Dodge Charger similar to Steve McQueen’s motor in the film Bullitt! In the late 1950’s he struck up close friendships with Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars and racing driver Graham Hill, then later with George Harrison, a fellow enthusiast. He became an avid collector of the Lotus brand, owning a succession of Chapman’s sports cars including the Lotus Mark IX, the Elite and the Elan before finally acquiring a closed two-seater Lotus Europa that he raced at Brands Hatch. The connections he made in the racing community led to the Chris Barber Band being offered regular gigs at Brands Hatch, and later regularly for the British Racing Driver Club and as recently as 2013 at Silverstone. His wife Kate remembers Chris being unable to resist taking a hair-raising spin round the Nürburgring track in his Mercedes while on tour in Germany where Chris enjoyed a huge following.

Apart from his own substantial back catalogue of recorded works, Chris Barber’s lasting legacy will be the ‘blues bridge’ that he helped to bring about between the US and the UK, allowing the ensuing music and friendship to do the talking at a time when racial discrimination was rife. He should be considered as one of the founding fathers of the UK R&B and blues scene, along with Alexis Korner and John Mayall, laying the ground for the rock and pop scene of the later 1960’s, which was to export back to the US a form of music inspired by its original American exponents. Chris’s ability to play with a genuine blues feel, “playing it right”, was appreciated by the legendary black American blues artists he befriended and played alongside.

St Paul’s also owes Chris a big debt of gratitude for the fundraising concerts he gave at the School in the late 1950’s and more recently in 2012. There have been enormous cultural changes between those gigs. At the first concert, given in the Great Hall at West Kensington, the boys were admonished for tapping their feet too loudly on the floor! Happily, we’re still tapping Chris. Thank you for the years of wonderful music-making – RIP.

I would like to thank Kate Barber and John Crocker, Chris’s long-term clarinettist and sax player, for their help with this article. 