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| Most recent update: July 2, 2009 |
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Boaters, Bowlers, and Bowties:
Chris Barber, Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk reunite for the first live performance in 10 years.
Live at the indigO2 at the O2, July 23rd, 2009. |
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British jazz trombonist Chris Barber celebrates his 60th year as a bandleader in 2008-2009. Inspired by the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, Chris formed his first Barber New Orleans Band in 1949 at the age of nineteen. In 1953, along with Monty Sunshine and Lonnie Donegan, he joined forces with Ken Colyer. Then, with the replacement of Colyer by Pat Halcox, Ken Colyer's Jazzmen became Chris Barber's Jazz Band in 1954 and has been one of Europe's most successful traditional jazz bands ever since.
Over the years, Chris Barber's Jazz Band evolved into the Chris Barber Jazz and Blues Band, a rich eight-piece group, blending brass, reeds, and electric guitar into a unique and unmistakable mix of blues and jazz. And despite being 'on the slide' since 1949, having performed over 10,000 concerts and made thousands of recordings, the Chris Barber Band keeps marching on, right into the 21st century. At the end of 2001 Chris extended his band with three more musicians into The BIG Chris Barber Band. |
The original Chris Barber's Jazz Band of
1954:
Chris Barber, Lonnie Donegan,
Jim Bray, Ron Bowden, Pat Halcox, and
Monty Sunshine. |
The 2008 version of the six-piece band: Dave Green,
Mike Snelling, John Sutton, Mike Henry, Joe Farler,
and Chris Barber.
(Photo by Andreas Wandfluh). |
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The Big Chris Barber Band in Haderslev, Denmark, 9th October 2008:
Back row: Zoltan Sagi (reeds), Richard Exall (reeds), John Service (trombone), Dave Green (bass);
Front row: Mike Snelling (reeds), Peter
Rudeforth (trumpet), John Sutton
(drums), Chris Barber (trombone),
Joe Farler (banjo & guitar), Mike Henry (trumpet), John Slaughter (electric guitar).
[Photograph by Olav B. Hansen; used by permission]
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The Big Chris Barber Band in Aarberg, Switzerland, November 7, 2008:
Dave Green (bass),
Zoltan Sagi (reeds),
Richard Exall (reeds),
Mike Snelling (reeds),
John Sutton (drums),
Peter Rudeforth (trumpet),
Mike Henry (trumpet),
Joe Farler (banjo & guitar), John Service (trombone),
John Slaughter (electric guitar), and
Chris Barber (trombone).
[Photograph by Andreas Wandfluh; used by permission] |
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Fifty-four years earlier: Chris Barber's Jazz Band, 1954-1955
Jim Bray (bass), Ron Bowden (drums), Monty Sunshine (clarinet), Pat Halcox
(cornet),
Lonnie Donegan (banjo), and Chris Barber (trombone).
[Photograph taken by the late Peter Hearn and provided to the Barber
website,
with permission to reproduce it, by Chas McDevitt.] |
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Chris Barber and Pat Halcox -- the longest continuous partnership in the history of jazz (1954-2008).
Photographs by Yvonne Pieters -- Used by permission. |
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Note: News items are shown with a
yellow background, while updates
to the
website are white. For a complete list of updates to the website since February 2004,
go to the Website Updates and Previous Features page. |
July 3, 2009
John Slaughter has very kindly donated a photo of himself and Steve Hammond. You can view the picture at the bottom of Steve's page in the "Former Members of the Bnad" section of the website. |
July 2, 2009
There is an excellent article about Alex Revell -- who was the clarinettist in Chris Barber's amateur bands in the early 1950s -- in the July 2009 edition Ian Maund's web magazine site, Sandy Brown Jazz. |
July 2, 2009
A Chris Barber-Related Item for Sale on eBay (June 2009): This is an historical curiosity rather than strictly an item from the Barber-Purser archives, but nevertheless we thought it might be interesting to fans: the sale (for charity) on eBay of one of the bikes used by a racing team sponsored by Chris in the 1960s. |
June 23, 2009
Announcement of a forthcoming concert: Barber, Ball and Bilk together in London on July 23rd, 2009. |
June 13, 2009
In Memory of Julian Purser: A page to commemorate Julian Purser, who was Chris Barber's archivist and discographer, and, from the beginning of 2004, one-third of the Chris Barber Website & Archives Team, which manages this site. |
June 9, 2009
All of the slide shows on the Slideshows page now have additional Flash versions as an alternative viewing format. |
May 27, 2009
The Chris Barber Band, 1954 to 2009: Fifty-five Years of Musical Milestones -- a page to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the founding of Chris Barber's Jazz Band in May 1954. |
May 15, 2009
Cover pages for two rare Chris Barber recordings: Gabadella Jazzband Med Chris Barber (LP) and Trad Tavern (CD). |
May 11, 2009
Todd Allen, who is half of the management team for the website to commemorate Cyril Davies, has written to say that there is a rare photograph of Lonnie Donegan and Ron Bowden accompanying Big Bill Broonzy on a French website about skiffle. |
May 9, 2009
Barber At Blenheim is the most recent recording by The Big Chris Barber Band. |
April 21, 2009
The great Barbican Blues double-LP from 1982 has now been re-issued on Lake Records LACD273. Read about this new release on the cover page for Barbican Blues. |
April 9, 2009
Julian Purser, who was Chris Barber’s archivist, co-discographer, and an integral part of the management of the Chris Barber website, has died after a long illness. Julian was a fan of the band for more than four decades, and it was as a result of his frequent visits to the Marquee Club in London in the early 1970s that he offered to take care of a mass of disorganized memorabilia that otherwise might have been discarded. Over the past thirty-five years Julian added many rare Barber-related items to this archive, as well as amassing his own impressive and enviable collection of Barber vinyl records, tapes, and compact discs. He also joined forces with well-known Dutch discographer Gerard Bielderman in compiling a comprehensive, accurate, and detailed discography of the Barber catalogue. Julian attended what must have been hundreds of Chris Barber club dates and concerts, several of which included such memorable events as the “great reunion concert” held at the Fairfield Hall in 1975, Chris’s seventy-fifth birthday concert in Liverpool, and the Lonnie Donegan memorial concert, which took place at the Royal Albert Hall. On top of all this, in recent years Julian occasionally travelled with the band, most notably to Denmark to hear them play with a symphony orchestra, as well as a memorable trip to Switzerland. Julian thoroughly enjoyed being “on the road”, and these and several other occasions are described in detail in Julian’s own words in various pages within this website, to which his contribution, since becoming a member of the three-person “website team” in 2004, was immeasurable. Julian was a good friend, an infectious enthusiast for all sorts of jazz – Chris Barber’s brand above all – and tireless in his enthusiasm for and efforts towards chronicling the career of one of Britain’s greatest musicians.
Ed Jackson and Andreas Wandfluh |
April 3, 2009
On one of the Big Chris Barber Band's recent European tours, trumpeter Mike Henry took some video and photographs on the scenic 30-km leg of the trip from Chur to Arosa, in Switzerland. You can see some of his results at On The Road In Switzerland. |
March 28, 2009
Chris Barber Face To Face With Rick Wakeman
Chris Barber's appearance on Rick Wakeman's new television series, Face To Face With Rick Wakeman, is now available for purchase download at RockOnDigital.com. |
March 26, 2009
Thanks to Danny Rouwenhorst, there is a scan of a rare Dutch version of the EP, Barber Plays Spirituals. |
March 25, 2009
Dipping back
into the past, we now have cover pages for Chris Barber's first 12-inch LP, Echoes Of Harlem (1955) and two related compact discs, Chris Barber At The BBC, Volume1 and Volume 2 (recorded in the early 1960s). |
March 21, 2009
Cover page for the 1960 LP, Chris Barber Bandbox Volume 2: Elite Syncopations. |
March 17, 2009
When Courtney Met Chris
BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 20 June at 8pm, with a shortened repeat following on Monday 22 June at 3pm.
This programme will explore Chris Barber's seminal role in the development of music in Britain. It will look at Chris Barber's career as a whole, but focus particularly on the period in the late 50s/early 60s when Chris and his band invited and played with the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It will also focus on how this influenced the British Blues explosion and discuss the experiences of those artists, the audiences, and the reverberations this had in the jazz world.
The programme will be presented by Courtney Pine. |
March 13, 2009
Thanks to Wilfried Wittke, the Sennheiser audio company has recently sponsored the band with a complete set of new microphones. |
March 13, 2009
The latest in the Lake Records series of chronological CDs from the 1950s, Chris Barber 57-58, is now available. |
March 6, 2009
Thanks to Keith Payne of Aylesbury, an unpublished photo of Monty Sunshine's Jazz Band in 1962 has been posted on Monty's page. |
March 5, 2009
Thanks to Todd Allen of the Cyril Davies website, here is a news item from the Sandy Brown Jazz website, run by Ian Maund:
BFI Mediatheque - Momma Don't Allow
It is perhaps worth reminding people of information originally sent to us by Anne Hudson about the Mediatheque at the British Film Institute on London's South Bank where the 1954 Karl Reisz / Tony Richardson 22 minute film 'Momma Don't Allow' can be viewed free of charge. The film was shot over nine Saturdays at Wood Green Jazz Club and features the Chris Barber Band at the time of Monty Sunshine, Lonnie Donegan and Ottilie Patterson. It's a great short film that really captures the atmosphere and audience at the Club.
The Mediatheque is a separate room at the BFI (near the Festival Hall and Hayward Gallery). It has a number of computers with fairly large screens each with its own comfortable single or double seats. You are given headphones when you go in and instructions on how to use the computers. You plug in (there are facilities for two people to watch at the same time) and choose the piece of film you want to watch. It is a very pleasant experience, a great resource and the staff are most helpful. You can book your computer in advance or just turn up and hope one is free. For more information click here. 'Momma Don't Allow' is also on a DVD set called 'Free Cinema' available from the BFI. |
March 5, 2009
Radio documentary about Sister Rosetta Tharpe:
Ben Williams of the Blues Legacy record label writes:
"They have now broadcast this 1 hour documenary which Chris kindly contributed to. It went out of BBC Radio 2 last night. However, you can listen online by clicking the link below (Chris comes in approx 38 mins):
www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/documentaries/shoutsistershout.shtml.
Perhaps you would put a link to our online store so fans can get a reminder that the Lost & Found Volume 1 CD features Sister and Chris. The link is www.classic-media-group.com/classic-direct/cd/cd-details.php?product=27"
Programme synopsis:
Ruby Turner tells the extraordinary story of the guitar playing Gospel singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was one of the most innovative Gospel musicians of her time. In her music you can hear Blues, R 'n' B and Rock 'n' Roll and is cited as an influenced for likes of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. When she married 20,000 people attended the wedding in a baseball stadium, yet when she died she was buried in an unmarked grave. Ruby Turner charts her rise to fame and popularity and subsequent demise, as white musicians began to imitate her guitar playing and Mahalia Jackson was promoted by Columbia records to be America's first gospel singer. |
March 4, 2009
Chris Barber will soon be appearing on Rick Wakeman's Face To Face, a new television interview series due to be broadcast on television stations around the world and on the World Wide Web. |
February 17, 2009
Reedman Richard Exall has set up his own web page at JazzClarinet.co.uk. Make sure you follow the links there to some more information about Richard, as well as to Richard Exall's Shooting Stars, whose front line consists of Richard together with fellow Barber Band members Peter Rudeforth, John Service, and John Sutton. |
February 13, 2009
At long last, there is now a covers page for one of the most important CDs in the Chris Barber catalogue: the two-disc compilation, The Complete Decca Sessions. This is quite an elaborate page, including covers of many of the other records on which the tracks have appeared, several music clips, and a video of a 78 rpm copy of Chimes Blues being played on an antique wind-up gramophone. |
February 6, 2009
One of the first items to be posted on this site in early 2004, Brian Rust's 1957 booklet, Chris Barber: A Biography, Appreciation, Record Survey, and Discography, has been re-scanned. |
February 5, 2009
The latest record cover to be posted is one of the oldest in the Barber catalogue, an EP of 1951 recordings called Chris Barber: Not In Hi-Fi. |
January 30, 2009
Andreas Wandfluh was at a recent concert by the Big Chris Barber Band in Zug, Switzerland. He has posted a small gallery of sound-check photos (which can also be viewed as a slide show) on his own Barber website. |
January 29, 2009
Acker Bilk celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday, the first of the "Three Bs" (Kenny Ball, Chris Barber, and Acker) to do so. A tribute to Acker has recently been published in The Guardian, and there is another on the "This Is Bristol" website. |
January 27, 2009
Matrix Jazz Record Research Magazine, December 1956: Contains of discography of Chris Barber records up to July 1956. |
January 21, 2009
On the 19th of January, Chris unveiled a stone in the pavement in the centre of Enkhuizen - a real jazz town in the Netherlands - on the Jazz Walk of Fame. |
January 16, 2009
Alan "Sticky" Wicket was a two-time occupant of the drum chair in the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band: from 1988 to 1990, and then from 1994 to 1998. Fans who remember his dynamic playing will be interested in Sticky Wicket's own website. |
January 13, 2008
A music clip and links to additional photos have been added to Zoltan Sagi's page, as well as to Peter Rudeforth's page. |
January 13, 2009
A page for Johnny McCallum, who played banjo and electric guitar in the Chris Barber Band between 1974 and 1994. |
January 10, 2009
The Chris Barber Band: Tour Programme, 1979 or Early 1980s. This is a 28-page full-colour programme, with photographs plus text by Miles Kington and Humphtey Lyttelton, in both English and German. |
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| In this new feature we look back to pages and events of particular interest which have been posted on the Chris Barber website since the beginning of 2004, when the Archives-Website "team" of Ed Jackson, Julian Purser, and Andreas Wandfluh assumed management of the site. |
November 12, 2008
It's now been about a year since the publication of Pete Frame's The Restless Generation, the story of British popular music in the 1950s. If you missed this terrific book -- which includes a great deal of material about Ken Colyer and Chris Barber -- read a review here, then order the book! |
June 22, 2008
There are well over a hundred short excerpts from Chris Barber's recordings scattered throughout this website, and summarized in Music Clips on the Barber Website. |
March 30, 2008
Although there has been a recent flurry of interest in the press, on radio, and on TV about Chris's pioneering of the British Blues Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, several previous articles posted on this site covered similar ground. Take a look at "Blues History, from fRoots, an article from Blueprint, and another from British Blues Review. |
February 11, 2007
You will find several radio interviews with Chris, dating back to the 1950s, on the In His Own Words page. |
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| Go to the New and Recent Releases page for more details and other recent releases. |
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The Big Chris Barber Band, Barber At Blenheim
Concert CD recorded in December 2007 and released in 2009.
Barber At Blenheim was recorded at a private function at Blenheim Palace on December 1, 2007. Although there have been some personnel changes since the time of the recording, current Barber concert-goers will particularly enjoy this CD as a souvenir of their evening, as the programme of thirteen tracks is a snapshot of a typical Big Chris Barber Band appearance. It features long-time Barber standards such as Bourbon Street Parade, The Martinique, Petite Fleur and The Saints, as well as several examples of the more recent move in the direction of re-interpreting early tunes by or associated with Duke Ellington (Rent Party Blues, Merry-Go-Round, Jubilee Stomp, and Hot And Bothered).
For more details, go to the New and Recent Releases page or the cover page for Barber At Blenheim. |
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The Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band, Barbican Blues
CD re-issue, April 2009, on
Lake Records LACD273.
One of my personal favourite recordings has been reissued by Paul Adams on Lake Records: the "Barbican Blues" concert of April 20, 1982 from London. It was the first jazz concert at the newly opened Barbican Centre and featured the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band with a great mix of different sounds. This CD is a complete reissue of the stereo double-LP on the Black Lion label (BLM 61003/4, issued in 1982). This is one of those CDs that best demonstrates the musical variety and versatility of the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band -- and it also looks ahead to the future development of the band into the present Big Chris Barber Band. (Andreas Wandfluh, April 2009). For more details, go to the New and Recent Releases page or the cover page for Barbican Blues.
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| For more information about the above new releases, go to the Blues Legacy page. |
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Many of Chris Barber's most recent CD recordings, including two by The Big Chris Barber Band and several others by the Chris Barber Jazz and Blues Band recorded in concerts in the mid- to late-1990s, are published on the Timeless Records label.
The most recent Timeless Records CD from the Big Chris Barber Band, Jubilee Stomp (Timeless CD TTD654), was released in November, 2003.
Listen to part of Black and Tan Fantasy from
Jubilee Stomp (Timeless CD TTD654).
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Welcome to the Chris Barber Website Message Board.
We hope you will find this a useful and entertaining addition to the site, where you can talk about anything related to Chris, the band, concerts, tours, recordings -- you name it. |
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| The fine print: Since January 1, 2004, www.chrisbarber.net has been maintained by Ed Jackson of Edmonton, Canada, with the help of Andreas Wandfluh (Switzerland), and, until his untimely death in 2009, Julian Purser (England). If you have any questions or comments about this website, please click here to send an e-mail message. All enquiries about management, concerts, bookings, etc., should be addressed to the band's management via the Contacts and Bookings link button above. |
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