Chris Barber

[Nate Dorward]

Thank Barber for the Beatles and Stones

If not for Chris Barber and his brand of jazz, MARK MILLER writes, Britain's rock 'n' roll invasion might never have happened

By MARK MILLER

Globe and Mail, Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Every jazz musician has his or her own story, each one a little different from the next. Chris Barber's story comes rattling across the Atlantic Ocean in a telephone interview from his home in Hungerford, west of London -- a flurry of asides, digressions, insights and, along the way, biographical details.

The veteran trombonist is making four Ontario appearances over the next few days with singer, guitarist and trumpeter Jeff Healey and his Toronto band, the Jazz Wizards. At 75, Barber arrives as a central figure from the British "trad revival" of the 1950s and a formative influence on both the British blues "boom" and rock "invasion" of the 1960s.

As he recalls it so exuberantly, he came to jazz by "sheer chance." The boy Barber liked the classics, although tellingly it was a "very, very acerbic, very acrid-sounding, double-stopped and crunchy" interpretation of a Bach violin solo recorded by Fritz Kreisler that really caught his ear at the age of seven -- "normally not something a child would like."

Three years later, while at boarding school, he heard a recording on the BBC of Eric Winstone's English dance band playing Oasis, a piece of Sahara-inspired exotica borrowed freely from the Duke Ellington hit Caravan, all "trumpet growls and bluesy saxophone sounds." Barber was suitably impressed. "I wrote my father a letter -- I only wrote him once in three years at boarding school; this was the one time -- and said, 'I've heard some jazz on the radio, will you send me some?' "

Advertisements

His father, a classical musician, consulted Gramophone magazine, and forwarded a recording that had just received a glowing review, Coleman Hawkins's landmark 1939 ballad version of Body and Soul. Barber still seems to marvel at the serendipity of his father's choice. "If you need to explain to somebody what you can, should and maybe should not do to a ballad," he says of the tenor saxophonist's rendition, "that's the perfect example."

The next revelation came in the form of the book Really the Blues, an idiosyncratic autobiography of the white Chicago clarinetist Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow, who had championed the racial integration of jazz in the 1920s and indeed seemed to want nothing more than to be black himself.

"For a young boy, brought up in a moderately left-wing household," Barber explains, "and knowing about slavery and what happened and what shouldn't have happened, that book was like a blue rag to a bull -- to make a pun out of it. Within days of reading it, I was totally hypnotized as a jazz, blues, African-American music enthusiast. That was it. Gone. And I have been ever since."

Barber formed his first band in the traditional New Orleans style in 1949, but it was his second, a sextet dating to 1954 with trumpeter Pat Halcox, clarinetist Monty Sunshine and others, that would become the focus of his career -- a career that by British jazz standards has been highly successful. Indeed, the band remains a force today, its evolution to its current, 11-strong lineup documented by CD reissues on the Lake label of its early LPs and new releases on Timeless of recent recordings.

If it's no coincidence that the trombonist has been rather less doctrinaire than many of the musicians affiliated with the "trad" movement, he still contends, "I'm an enormous purist, but pure jazz to me is not what some people think it is. It's a philosophical concept, a purity of feeling, of genuine expression. That's the point about it, it seems to me."

That philosophical concept saw the Barber band, and its singer and banjo player Lonnie Donegan in particular, popularize "skiffle" music during the early 1950s, setting the stage for the many younger British musicians, the Beatles among them, who would play in skiffle groups of their own before turning to rock 'n' roll in the early 1960s. It also found the Barber band presenting a dozen or more leading African-American blues and gospel artists as it guests during the same general period, similarly inspiring a younger generation of British R&B musicians who formed such bands as the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.

"I think there's a good chance they'd never have heard the blues otherwise," Barber suggests. "It was only because we had the financial strength -- with tours and so on -- that we could bring Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the others in."

Indeed, Waters, Terry, McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, James Cotton, Louis Jordan and their compatriots were so insufficiently known in Britain that the country's promoters, seeing little financial advantage to their presence on a bill, refused to pay extra for their services. Barber was told, " 'You pay for them if you want them.' So we did.

"We wanted to play with them. We recognized that if there were a certain lack in the British traditional jazz, it was that it wasn't black enough -- to be brutally frank. We didn't have the blues background, or the gospel background."

How better to acquire firsthand familiarity with both than to stand on-stage beside some of each idiom's greatest proponents? And then, naturally enough, to travel to America in person -- which the Barber band soon did, visiting New Orleans and stopping by Muddy Waters's club in Chicago in 1958 during the first of several tours stateside.

Of course, Barber's willingness to depart from the rigid tenets of traditional jazz, together with the commercial success that allowed him to do it, stood him in poor stead with the most faithful of the faithful. "In Europe," he notes, "most people who were serious about jazz wouldn't accept bands like mine, largely because the bands were popular."

But the last laugh would be his, even as he has expanded his circle of associates and associations further over the years to include Dr. John, the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble and, as recently as a concert last month in Liverpool, Van Morrison.

Never mind those unnamed critics whose words more than 50 years ago still seem to rankle. "All I know is when we got to America and began to meet real jazz musicians of real quality, of real experience and knowledge, all of them were very encouraging to us. They'd say, 'We like your band. It's very good music. You're doing it the right way. Come and sit in with us.' Which was somehow unexpected. We had been led to believe that we weren't any good, so to be accepted totally in that sort of way was a shock."

Sure, he admits, his British band sounded a little different than its American counterparts. Distance will have that effect. "If you can tell the difference between a blues singer from Louisiana and one from Mississippi," he proposes, with just a hint of defiance ringing down through the years and across the Atlantic, "then what's wrong with telling the difference between a jazz band from London and one from New Orleans?"

Chris Barber appears with Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards in the Old Town Hall at Hilton Beach, Ont., tonight, Hugh's Room in Toronto on Friday, the Regent Theatre in Picton, Ont., on Aug. 21 as part of the Prince Edward County Jazz Festival and Hugh's Room again on the 23rd.