Chris Barber – trombone, vocals, bandleader
Chris Barber: trombonist, bassist, band-leader, pioneer of British jazz and blues — and one of the great jazz musicians of the twentieth century. Chris has been leading a band for almost sixty years: 2008 marks the fifty-fourth anniversary of the formation of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, which later became the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band, and then, in 2001, the Big Chris Barber Band. Chris, his band, and his music — not to mention his devotion to jazz and the blues and his pioneering efforts to bring jazz and blues stars to Britain for the first time in the 1950s and 1960s — have influenced, both directly and indirectly, almost everything that has happened on the music scene in the last half-century, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and hundreds, possibly thousands of others, both amateur and professional.
Of course, this website as a whole is a celebration of Chris and his band’s music, but on this page we concentrate specifically on Chris himself, in the form of articles, interviews, music, and photographs.
Chris was born in Welwyn Garden City in 1930. He developed his interest in jazz during the war years, and began to play in the later part of the 1940s. His story and that of the band has been told and re-told many times, not least often by Chris himself. In fact you can listen to Chris talking about his early days at a concert in Basingstoke in June 2003:
There are lots of sound clips throughout the website, but two special selections of „blended“ music have been chosen to highlight Chris’s music and celebrate the length of his career: Misty Morning, recorded in 1951 & 2003, and The Martinique, from 1954 and 2003.