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| The Complete Decca Sessions 1954/55 |
| Chris Barber |
angol
első megjelenés éve: 2001 |
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| (2001)
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2 x CD |
| 5.075 Ft
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| 1. CD tartalma: |
| 1. | Bobby Shaftoe
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| 2. | Chimes Blues
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| 3. | The Martinique
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| 4. | New Orleans Blues
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| 5. | Merry Down Rag
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| 6. | Stevedore Stomp
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| 7. | Weeping Willow Blues
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| 8. | Nobody Knows You When You're Down & Out
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| 9. | Rock Island Line
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| 10. | John Henry
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| 11. | Nobody's Child
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| 12. | Wabash Cannonball
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| 2. CD tartalma: |
| 1. | Lord, Lord, Lord
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| 2. | Merry Down Blues
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| 3. | Skokiaan
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| 4. | I'd Love It
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| 5. | Storyville Blues
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| 6. | It's Tight Like That
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| 7. | Bury My Body
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| 8. | Diggin' My Potatoes
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| 9. | Ice Cream
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| 10. | Oh Didn't He Ramble
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| 11. | The Girls Go Crazy
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| 12. | I Never Knew Just What A Girl Could Do
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| 13. | St. Louis Blues
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| 14. | I Hate A Man Like You
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| 15. | Salutation March
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| 16. | Reckless Blues
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| 17. | The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise
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Jazz
Featuring
Lonnie Donegan
Ottilie Patterson
Monty Sunshine
Pat Halcox
Jim Bray
Ron Bowden
Disc 1: The Studio Sessions
Disc 2: The Live Sessions
The Complete Decca Sessions 1954/55 was one of the earliest compilation CDs of Chris Barber's music re-mastered and released by Paul Adams on his Lake Records label. The total of 27 tracks on this double-CD come from several sessions recorded by the original Chris Barber's Jazz Band. They start with the recording of the eight-track vinyl LP, New Orleans Joys, on July 13, 1954, and end with a last session for Decca consisting of a couple of Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group numbers and two band tracks with vocals by Ottilie Patterson, on March 16 of the next year.
Chris Barber's Jazz Band, 1954 to 1955
While the band recorded and released other material on the competing Pye and Columbia labels during the same period, the tracks included here are of enormous historical significance in Chris Barber's musical career, not to mention in the subsequent evolution of British jazz, skiffle, pop, and rock music. Not only do they include the first recordings made by the Barber Band after the split with Ken Colyer six weeks earlier, but they also encompass two stirring and influential "live" performances at the Royal Festival Hall. The first of these, which took place on October 30, 1954, was significant in that Chris invited saxophone veteran Bertie King to guest with the band - much to the horror, apparently, of traditional jazz purists in the audience and record-buying public - which presaged Chris's career-long efforts to break with tradition and the straitjackets imposed by strict adherence to the New Orleans code.
Even more important was the second concert, held on January 9, 1955, mere days after Ottilie Patterson had joined the band as its full-time blues vocalist, and at which - to quote the sleeve notes of an LP released some years later, "Barber introduced Ottilie Patterson, a slim young Irish girl from Belfast to sing with the band. The critics and fans were stunned by her powerful and vivid blues singing as she swept majestically through Handy's St. Louis Blues. George Melly, reviewing the concerts for one of the musical papers, likened her to a reincarnated Bessie Smith."
The other main aspect of the historical importance of these recordings, of course, is that the first session included two tracks by the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group, most notably Rock Island Line, which went on to become a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic and which - as Pete Frame, among countless other music historians, has recounted in his excellent book, The Restless Generation - changed the course of popular music in Britain and much of the rest of the world.
In this compilation, Paul Adams wisely chose not to sequence the tracks chronologically but to put the studio recordings on the first CD, with the concert recordings on the second. He also included an excellent CD booklet in the package, together with a long and informative essay, several photos, and the conventional - and thorough - discographical information.
This is not by any means the first time that these 27 recordings have been available. In addition to their first appearance on vinyl LPs, EPs, and singles - as well as a few 78 rpm shellac discs - they were also reissued in various vinyl formats in the ensuing years. The covers of many of these original and reissue releases are shown below, and you can click on each one for more details, either to link to other pages in the Chris Barber website, or to specially-prepared pages as companions to this one, which show relatively high-resolution scans from the various sleeves, and in some cases the text of the original sleeve notes.
At the time of writing, this 2-CD set has been available for around nine years, and can still be purchased directly from Lake Records. If it's not part of your Barber collection, it should be. Although some of the tracks have recently appeared on other compilations (for example, New Orleans To London/New Orleans Joys and Just About As Good As It Gets), the Complete Decca Sessions is the only CD which includes all of the historic 1954-55 Chris Barber recordings for Decca.
If I haven't yet convinced you of the indispensability of this collection, let me conclude by pointing out that Richard Cook and Brian Morton, in the seventh (2004) edition of their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, identify a "Core Collection": recommendations for a set of some two hundred CDs encompassing the entire range of the music. The Complete Decca Sessions is one of those choices.
---Ed Jackson, February 2009
Chris Barber
Active Decades: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: Apr 17, 1930 in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Dixieland, Trad Jazz, Dixieland Revival
Trombonist and bandleader Chris Barber spearheaded the Anglo-European trad jazz movement during the late '50s and early '60s and devoted 60 years to the endless celebration of old-fashioned music. But that's only part of his story. Even as he presided over that transatlantic response to the Dixieland revival, Barber went out of his way to make music with U.S. blues legends Big Bill Broonzy, Brother John Sellers, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Otis Spann, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Sonny Boy Williamson II. This cross-pollination dramatically affected the lives and careers of budding British rockers such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Burdon, Jimmy Page, and John Mayall.
Donald Christopher "Chris" Barber was born on April 17, 1930, in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, just north of London, England. After studying double bass and trombone at London's Guildhall School of Music, he assembled the King Oliver-inspired Barber New Orleans Band in 1949. In 1953 he co-founded a group called the Jazzmen with Ken Colyer, a cornetist who had just returned from New Orleans where he had worked with clarinetist George Lewis. In 1954 the group was rechristened Chris Barber's Jazz Band. Trumpeter Pat Halcox had begun what would amount to a 59-year commitment, banjoist/guitarist Lonnie Donegan now sang songs from the jazz, blues, and folk traditions, and Barber sometimes performed on the string bass while Beryl Bryden stroked a washboard.
Donegan and Barber are credited with having ignited the mid-'50s U.K. skiffle movement with a 1955 cover of Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line" that went gold on both sides of the Atlantic. Another of the band's chart-topping hits was its interpretation of Sidney Bechet's "Petite Fleur," a feature for clarinetist Monty Sunshine that led to the eventual rise of pop instrumentalist Acker Bilk. The year 1955 also saw the arrival of Barber's future wife, vocalist Ottilie Patterson, a blues-based performer who sang duets with Sister Rosetta Tharpe when the gospel/swing star sat in with the band in 1957. Barber's often surprisingly diverse lineup also included Jamaican saxophonists Joe Harriott and Bertie King.
In 1959 Barber went cinematic by generating music for Look Back in Anger, a film noir exercise in kitchen sink realism directed by Tony Richardson and starring Richard Burton as a violently misogynistic, emotionally disturbed confection peddler and part-time Dixieland trumpeter (dubbed by Pat Halcox). Barber made the first of many U.S. tours in 1959, bringing out of the woodwork African-American jazz veterans like pianist Hank Duncan, clarinetist Edmond Hall, trumpeter Sidney DeParis, and rhythm & blues pioneer singer/saxophonist Louis Jordan. Barber's 1960s discography includes air shots from the BBC radio archives and live recordings made in Budapest and East Berlin, with gospel and folk material enriching the already fertile ground of the band's repertoire. As the years passed, a gradually renamed Chris Barber's Jazz & Blues Band regularly employed blues and rock musicians, blurring the artificially imposed delineations between genres while offering music that was accessible to a wide range of listeners.
Barber spent a lot of time performing in Europe during the 1970s, and after the passing of Duke Ellington deliberately sought out some of Duke's key soloists in organist Wild Bill Davis, saxophonist Russell Procope, and singer/trumpeter/violinist Ray Nance. Throughout the 1980s Barber stayed faithful to his traditional and progressive instincts by teaming up with Louisiana singer, philosopher, and keyboardist Dr. John. Originally from backgrounds as different as could be, the two made several records together and toured a show called Take Me Back to New Orleans. The 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century found Barber carrying the torch of trad jazz into a sixth decade of creative professional activity, often expanding his group to include 11 players while consistently delivering music of unpretentious warmth and historic depth.
--- arwulf arwulf, All Music Guide |
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