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. In time they were to use a trad line-up — trumpets, clarinet, trombone, banjo, drums and double bass — to play every type of what was then called ‘American negro music’ from spirituals to swing. Their love for this music not so much shines as gently glows from the pages of Barber’s somewhat restrained and accountant-like memoir. (He had set out to be an actuary before music beckoned.) Old-fashioned quiet decency distinguishes him from the usual run of sarcastic British jazzmen.
His music is not innovative but retrospective. He obviously wished to direct his fans towards the American originators. Marching music from New Orleans suited the Aldermaston marchers and trad became another word for Ban the Bomb. Left-wing protest has had a party atmosphere ever since.
To my mind Barber’s greatest achievement is his championing of the blues and gospel singers and musicians, whose careers have been revitalised as a result of having been brought to Britain by him.
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