Chris Barber

As a trombonist and bandleader, Chris Barber guided the trad jazz surge across Anglo-European borders from the late 1950s into the early 1960s while dedicating six decades to the ongoing revival of vintage musical forms. Breakthrough recognition arrived for him in the 1950s through releases such as the 1954 album New Orleans Joys, the source of Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle standard “Rock Island Line.” He further reached the U.K. Top 20 in 1959 via “Petite Fleur,” his version of the Sydney Bechet composition that highlighted clarinetist Monty Sunshine. Such milestones, however, represent only a segment of his trajectory. Even while directing that transatlantic counterpart to the Dixieland revival, Barber deliberately collaborated with U.S. blues figures Big Bill Broonzy, Brother John Sellers, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Otis Spann, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Sonny Boy Williamson II. Those partnerships left a marked imprint on the trajectories of rising British rock performers including the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Burdon, Jimmy Page, and John Mayall.

Donald Christopher “Chris” Barber entered the world on April 17, 1930, in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, just north of London, England. Following studies in double bass and trombone at London’s Guildhall School of Music, he formed the King Oliver-inspired Barber New Orleans Band in 1949. Three years later he established the Jazzmen alongside cornetist Ken Colyer, recently returned from New Orleans where he had performed with clarinetist George Lewis. The ensemble became Chris Barber’s Jazz Band in 1954. Trumpeter Pat Halcox launched what grew into a 59-year tenure, banjoist and guitarist Lonnie Donegan began delivering numbers drawn from jazz, blues, and folk sources, and Barber occasionally switched to string bass as Beryl Bryden played washboard.

Donegan and Barber receive credit for sparking the mid-1950s U.K. skiffle wave through their 1955 gold-certified rendition of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” which succeeded on both sides of the Atlantic. The band’s reading of Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur,” spotlighting clarinetist Monty Sunshine, also climbed the charts and helped launch pop instrumentalist Acker Bilk. In 1955 Barber’s future wife, blues-oriented vocalist Ottilie Patterson, joined the lineup; she later shared duets with gospel and swing artist Sister Rosetta Tharpe during the latter’s 1957 guest appearances. Jamaican saxophonists Joe Harriott and Bertie King likewise appeared among the group’s notably varied personnel.

Barber turned to film work in 1959, supplying music for Look Back in Anger, the kitchen-sink noir directed by Tony Richardson and featuring Richard Burton as a violently misogynistic confection seller and occasional Dixieland trumpeter whose parts were dubbed by Pat Halcox. That same year Barber undertook his initial U.S. tour, unearthing Black jazz veterans pianist Hank Duncan, clarinetist Edmond Hall, trumpeter Sidney DeParis, and rhythm-and-blues pioneer singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan. His 1960s output encompassed BBC radio broadcasts and concert recordings from Budapest and East Berlin, with gospel and folk selections further enriching the band’s already broad repertoire.

Over subsequent years the gradually retitled Chris Barber’s Jazz & Blues Band routinely incorporated blues and rock players, dissolving rigid genre boundaries while presenting material that appealed to broad audiences. Blues guitarist John Slaughter became a permanent member in 1964. Barber also cut the 1972 album Drat That Fratle Rat with guitarist Rory Gallagher. He performed extensively across Europe during the 1970s and, following Duke Ellington’s death, sought out several of Ellington’s principal soloists, among them organist Wild Bill Davis, saxophonist Russell Procope, and singer, trumpeter, and violinist Ray Nance.

Throughout the 1980s Barber upheld both traditional and forward-looking impulses through partnerships with Louisiana singer, philosopher, and keyboardist Dr. John. Despite originating from markedly different backgrounds, the pair produced multiple recordings, among them the 1990 album On a Mardi Gras Day, and mounted the touring production Take Me Back to New Orleans. During the 1990s and the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Barber sustained the trad-jazz lineage into his sixth decade of professional work, frequently enlarging the ensemble to eleven members while maintaining an output marked by unpretentious warmth and historical resonance.

In later life Barber contended with dementia and stepped away from performing in 2019. He died on March 2, 2021, at age 90. Three months afterward the Last Record Company, whose name proved ironic, issued A Trailblazer’s Legacy. Conceived well before his death, the four-disc collection assembled material spanning more than seven decades, documenting his collaborations with American blues legends and including 18,000 words of annotation by Alyn Shipton. The following year the Lake label released Just Once More for All Time, a six-disc, 109-track compilation—105 of the selections previously unreleased—that concentrated on his artistic evolution and featured recordings by numerous iterations of his bands.