Chris Barber's Jazz Band - The Complete Decca Sessions 1954/55 / 2CD set

The 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 album, 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.

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.