Pye Nixa NJE 1040
Nixa Jazz Today Series
7” EP
Recorded 15/12/56

Tracks

Side 1
Panama (Tyres)

Side 2
(a) Mood Indigo (Ellington, Bigard and Mills)
(b) Bourbon Street Parade (Barbarin) introducing When the Saints Go Marching In (Trad. arr. Barber)
Recorded at the Royal Festival Hall, London, 15th December, 1956

Sleeve Notes

By the time these four titles were recorded, at a Royal Festival Hall concert in December, 1956, the Chris Barber band had become the biggest musical draw of any kind in the whole country – a band so successful that, in the course of its nation-wide one-night stands, its Sunday concerts, its radio, TV and jazz club dates, it had in the three short years of its experience displaced the big swing bands, the palais orchestras, the Latin-Americans and all other jazz groups in the fight to win the public’s esteem!

A remarkable achievement, this, especially for a jazz band – and one that, only a few years previously, would have seemed an outright impossibility. The driving force behind the apparent miracle was Chris Barber’s own fiery enthusiasm: an enthusiasm which drove him to form his own first band, in the King Oliver mould, in the winter of 1949 when he was still an apprentice actuary with an insurance company; which drove him to give up his safe career and turn professional musician; which permitted him to disband his successful first group because he found the rigidities of strict New Orleans style too confining, and form another; which boosted him through many vicissitudes until today that band holds the enviable position in Show Business that it does.

This second EP excerpt from the original “Chris Barber In Concert” LP showcases the band itself instrumentally. Panama, which exuberantly fills the whole of Side 1, is the derivative of the archaic New Orleans Panama Rag so successfully resuscitated by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in the very early thirties and absorbed since the Revival into traditionalist repertoires all over the world – but which still leaves plenty of room for this Barber treatment to display a fresh inventiveness and a creative flexibility in every chorus.

Side Two opens with a poignantly reflective, highly personal version of the Duke Ellington masterpiece, Mood Indigo and closes with a rousing performance of Barber’s play-off music, Bourbon Street Parade. This number, which – with its introduction of the inevitable Saints – so successfully closed the concert, is of course one more of those “good old good ones”, written by famous drummer Paul Barbarin and inspired by the street of the same name in New Orleans, itself in turn the inspiration for the ever fresh and always exciting music of Chris Barber.

Personnel

Chris Barber-trombone
Pat Halcox-trumpet
Monty Sunshine-clarinet
Ron Bowden-drums
Eddie Smith-banjo
Dick Smith-bass

Sleeve:
Design: Ian Bradbery
Photography: Walter Hanlon

Recording:
Balance: Eric Tomlinson
Supervision: Denis Preston