Roy Kerridge

Chris Barber should let someone meaner tell his story

Jazz Me Blues is a memoir of a remarkable life by a man far too nice to do it justice

Chris Barber Photo: Redferns/Getty 
issue 16 August 2014

Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on the radio programme Music While You Work and tried to find out more about this wonderful music. He soon discovered that, in his words, ‘black music was the real thing, although some white people managed it pretty well’.

By the time I became a secondary schoolboy in the 1950s, Chris Barber’s band was the sensation of the age. Chris played the trombone, sometimes switching to harmonica on blues numbers. He and his glamorous Northern Irish wife, Ottilie Patterson, seemed a golden couple. Ottilie had a superb voice for the blues, ancient or modern. She sounded like a classic blues singer of the 1920s, presenting a style that had died out in North America.

Barber and his band began by copying 1920s jazz, known in America as Dixieland and in England as trad.

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