Gordon Solomon remembers Chris Barber

The end of an era, Chris was hugely important for introducing firstly New Orleans Jazz, then R&B, Gospel, Eastern European jazz influences and some more modern jazz sounds to world wide audiences over the years. 

His bands were unerringly correct in their approach to the music, his arrangements and indeed his trombone playing  were immaculate and unique, and lets not forget he played very accurate double bass too. 

The River City Jazzmen had the pleasure of playing as the back up band for Chris on a few occasions and I always found him very approachable and helpful. There is no doubt that he inspired literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of young people, myself included, to take up an instrument and see how far they could progress playing jazz.

Because of the huge success of his band in the 1950's  he did tend to be typecast for playing traditional jazz, which is a shame as his later band played a much broader program, latterly specialising in the music of Duke Ellington. I could write many pages outlining his achievements but these are well documented on the internet.

Gordon S