Chris Barber British music mainstay BORN 1930
“Let us not talk of ‘trad’ and banjos and things,” insisted Mike Hales’ sleevenote for Chris Barber’s landmark 1969 album Battersea Rain Dance. “Let us yet think of music and musicians, of mop tops and soul men, of jazz giants and fading, even dead, blues masters…”
What was true for that record – with its brilliantly unclassifiable two-minute Barber-penned title track, guest appearances from Brian Auger and Paul McCartney, and striking big-band beat-group versions of tunes by Charles Mingus, Curtis Mayfield and Joe Zawinul, among others – is doubly apt for Chris Barber’s career as a whole. The urbane and open-minded trombonist and bandleader did as much as any other single musician to shape the British musical landscape of homegrown responses to black American innovation.
Born Donald Christopher Barber in Welwyn Garden City on Ebit April 17, 1930, he was the true Godfather of the British blues boom – giving Alexis Korner his big break and bringing Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Terry And Brownie McGee to Britain in the late 1950s. He was the midwife of British rock’n’roll, too, launching the skiffle boom by playing double bass on his banjo player Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line single, which was recorded in downtime on a 1956 Barber studio session. His was also the first British group to play on the Ed Sullivan Show, selling a million copies of their 1959 version of Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur.
In the ’60s and ’70s Barber established a particular rapport with jazz-lovers behind the Iron Curtain – a special relationship sealed with a double live album recorded in East Berlin. He carried on working right up to his retirement in 2019, touring the US and Europe, with the release of 2011’s Memories Of My Trip – featuring collaborations with admirers including Van Morrison and Dr. John – a late career highlight. The whole thing seems to have been fun, though, and when this writer spoke to him (in 2018) about his amazing 1972 trad jazz/space rock crossover album Drat That Fratle Rat!, he fondly recalled playing a one-off gig with Rory Gallagher at a disused cinema in Swindon.
Ben Thompson
“Chris Barber was the midwife of British rock’n’roll.”