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Chris Barber was born Donald Christopher Barber in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England on April 17, 1930. He started learning the violin when he was seven years old, got his education at Hanley Castle Grammar School, Malvern, Worcestershire, to the age of 15, where he started to develop an interest in jazz. After the end of World War II, he attended St Paul’s School in London, and began visiting clubs to hear jazz groups. He then spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music, and started playing music with friends.

The 1950s saw Barber forming the New Orleans Jazz Band, with him on double bass, playing both trad jazz and blues tunes. By 1952 he became a professional musician. With clarinetist Monty Sunshine they formed a band in later that year, and began playing in London clubs, accepting an offer to play in Denmark in early 1953, making its debut in Copenhagen. The bands played Dixieland jazz, and later ragtime, swing, blues and R&B and the band became The Chris Barber Band.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Barber was mainly responsible for arranging the first UK tours of blues artists which would spark the British invasion of the U.S. charts in the 1960s. Stunning traditionalists in 1964, he introduced blues guitarist John Slaughter into the line up. This eleven-man “Big Chris Barber Band” offered a broader range of music including Duke Ellington, while reserving a spot in the programme for the traditional six-man New Orleans line-up.

He published his autobiography Jazz Me Blues in 2014, with co-author Alyn Shipton. He retired in 2019 after some 70 years of performing, with an OBE to his credit for services to music, an honorary doctorate from Durham University, and awarded the Blues Louis for his services to popularizing the blues in Europe, and the German Jazz Trophy.

Trombonist Chris Barber, who suffered from dementia in the period before his death, passed away on March 2, 2021 at 90.

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