Photo by Andreas Wandfluh
 
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New DVD and CD sets: Released in the UK on March 10, 2008.
You can download all three volumes of the Lost & Found series as follows:
Volume 1 || Volume 2 || Volume 3
"I would love the opportunity to give 15 stars for these discs –
5 for their importance, 5 for the remastering and 5 for the performances themselves –
but I’m only allowed to give 5 stars so I will." -- Music-News.com
Promotional video trailers on YouTube: Lost & Found (CDs) and As We Like It (DVD).
Advance promotional material: Lost & Found; As We Like It.

The Official Blues Legacy Website.
The Blues Legacy page on the Chris Barber Website.
Photo credited to DAYLE/WAVELENGTH
British jazz trombonist Chris Barber celebrates his 59th year as a bandleader in 2007-2008. 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 Jazz & Blues 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 2007 version of the six-piece band: Dave Green, Mike Snelling, John Sutton, Pat Halcox, Joe Farler, and Chris Barber. Listen to a clip from The Martinique
(Vic Pitt on bass).
Photo by Andreas Wandfluh
The Big Chris Barber Band in March 2008:
Richard Exall, Tony Carter, Mike Snelling, Dave Green, John Sutton,
Pat Halcox, Mike Henry, John Service, Joe Farler, John Slaughter, and Chris Barber
Fifty 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.]
Photo by Andreas Wandfluh
Pat Halcox, Chris Barber, and Mike Henry, April 10th, 2008
Photo by Andreas Wandfluh
Pat Halcox and Chris Barber, November 2007
Photo by Bernard Flegar
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.
May 7, 2008
The Big Chris Barber Band at Swinging-Hannover, 2008: Photographs taken by Helge Lorenz at an outdoor concert.
April 30, 2008
Several updates to the website, using recent photographs provided by Andreas Wandfluh:
  • The Band Evolution page has been brought up to date now that John Service has joined the band;
  • Photographs from Zürich-Albisgüetli, April 10, 2008;
  • A composite page showing all of the photos from Zürich-Albisgüetli, linked to the Big Chris Barber Band page;
  • New photograph on the Behind the Scenes page.
    • April 29, 2008
    Click here for some great concert photos of the Barber band at Jazzfest Gronau 2008.
    April 28, 2008
    Here's an item for Chris's Dutch fans: an article from Block magazine about the Lost & Found series of CDs.
    April 28, 2008
    There are some great informal club photos of the band here.
    April 21, 2008
    Cover of the rare 12-inch bootleg vinyl LP, Muddy Waters in Concert, 1958; this is the version that came out on Krazy Kat Records in 1982.
    April 20, 2008
    The Big Chris Barber Band in Switzerland: Photographs by Andreas Wandfluh taken at a concert in April 2008, set to music excerpted from the recennt DVD, As We Like It.
    March 31, 2008
    Thanks to Keith Scott, we now have scans (plus some related material) of the two EPs that Chris Barber recorded in 1961 with Jimmy Cotton and members of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated: Chris Barber Presents Jimmy Cotton and Chris Barber Presents Jimmy Cotton 2.
    March 30, 2008
    Short excerpts from four of the tracks on the new Barber DVD, As We Like It, have been posted on the Music Clips page, and detailed information about the DVD can be found on the As We Like It cover page as well as on the New and Recent Releases page.
    March 22, 2008
    Several videos related directly or indirectly to the Barber Band have been posted on YouTube. Among the most notable are a two-tune excerpt from 6.5 Special, a BBC-TV programme that looks as if it was originally broadcast in 1957, and a fascinating conversation between George Melly and Ken Colyer. There are quite a lot of other Barber-related videos on YouTube, which you can find by searching for Chris Barber, Ottilie Patterson, Lonnie Donegan, Ken Colyer, and so on.
    March 17, 2008
    Prompted by the release of the recent Lost & Found CD-set, Owen Adams has written an excellent article on The Guardian's theblogmusic site about the importance of visits to Britain by Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the late 1950s.
    March 16, 2008
    Andreas Wandfluh, one of the three members of the 'team" which maintains this website, has posted photographs of the Band in concert and rehearsal in Lucerne, Switzerland, on March 13th on his own website: The Big Chris Barber Band in Lucerne, 13.03.2008. Also, thanks to Andreas, photos of new trombonist John Service have replaced the temporary ones that have appeared here since John joined the band several weeks ago.
    March 12, 2008
    There's a good article on The Independent website about Humphrey Lyttelton's retiring as the host of The Best of Jazz on BBC Radio 2.
    March 10, 2008
    Alex Hosking of Australia has provided us with scans of an autographed ticket from a concert he attended in 1957.
    March 6, 2008
    The Chris Barber Band, 1964 to 1968: the fifth in a series of pages about particular line-ups of the band.
    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.
    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.
    January 28, 2008
    As additional background material for the forthcoming Blues Legacy Lost & Found CD & Download series, you might want to read the original programmes for the 1950s tours by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Muddy Waters, and the 1962 tour by Louis Jordan.
    January 1, 2008
    Today marks the 53rd anniversary of Ottilie Patterson's joining Chris Barber's Jazz Band.
    December 15, 2007
    It's now 51 years since the famous concert at the Royal Festival Hall on December 15, 1956, which was recorded and issued on the first 12-inch LP in the Pye/Nixa Chris Barber In Concert series. Here, you can view the concert programme and read some reminiscences of the concert by Chris Robins, who was in the audience that night.
    Go to the New and Recent Releases page for more details and other recent releases.
     
     
    For more information about the above new releases, go to the Blues Legacy page.
     
    Can't Stop Now, first issued in March 2007, has been re-released worldwide in stores and via digital download: see the announcement towards the top of this page.   Just About As Good As It Gets is a new 2-CD reissue of a great deal of material from the early Barber Bands, originally released on a variety of labels, with recording dates from 1951 to 1957.
     
    New from Lake Records: Chris Barber 1956 (LACD 246) -- complete recordings from that year, including Chris Barber Plays, Volume 2, the first Chris Barber In Concert 12-inch LP, and 10 skiffle tracks.   New from Lake Records: That Patterson Girl.
    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).

    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.

    The fine print: Since January 1, 2004, www.chrisbarber.net has been maintained by Ed Jackson of Edmonton, Canada, with the help of Julian Purser (England) and Andreas Wandfluh (Switzerland). 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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