Chris Barber
Chris Barber's band (including Harold Pendleton, Pat Halcox, Dick Smith and Eddie Smith)
Photograph by Ida Kar bromide print, late 1950s NPG x200215
Chris Barber (1930 – 2021)
Lived at: Brunner Close
Profession: Band Leader, trombonist and bassist
About his life:
- Trombonist, bassist and band leader for seventy years
- Led Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, which later became the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band, then the Chris Barber Band
- Brought jazz and blues stars to Britain for the first time in the 1950s and 1960s
- Music influenced the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and many more
- Married to Ottilie Patterson
Donald Christopher Barber was born in Welwyn Garden City. He studied violin as a child buying his first trombone age 18; he became interested in jazz during the Second World War. He began playing in the 1940s, led his own band from 1949 and had a significant part in shaping British popular music between then and the 1960s. In 1956 he had his first million-selling hit. Barber’s bands combined traditional jazz with the music of Duke Ellington as well as with rock’n’roll and rhythm and blues. He married Ottilie Patterson, a Northern Irish blues singer, in 1959 and they moved to the Suburb in 1962. In 1960 Barber’s band filled the Royal Festival Hall. His was the first British band to play on the wildly popular US Ed Sullivan TV show. Barber was a motoring enthusiast. He was made an OBE in 1991. He published his autobiography, Jazz Me Blues, in 2014 and had been leading his band for 70 years when he announced his retirement in 2019. He married four times – Ottilie was his second wife.
