Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival
The Big Chris Barber Band
George Square Spiegeltent
Keith Bruce
***
ALONGSIDE the wealth of intricate technical detail of the Apollo 11 moon mission that I have recently discovered my 11-year-old brain found a berth for, it also harboured a deep resentment that I was not permitted to attend the memorial concert for Edinburgh’s Archie Sinclair, trombonist leader of Old Bailey and the Jazz Advocates, headlined by the Chris Barber Band. It now seems unlikely that my father ever actually gave such an undertaking, but the capital’s licensing laws were cited as the reason he took my mum instead, who would concede she was less besotted with jazz.
Roll on five decades, on the hard-to-top 70th anniversary of Barber founding the band, the leader himself is the notable absentee in a packed house, for a programme of music that leans heavily on the very beginning of New Orleans trad and is still very much in the spirit of Barber himself even if, at 89, he was not well enough to make this date.
The Spiegeltent Palais du Variete is a natural dance-hall, as Sunday’s gig by Sons of Kemet proved, but here the chairs were in serried ranks and when genial MC and highly articulate clarinettist Bert Brandsma encouraged everyone to clap along to a blues number, it was not hard to envisage a nurse wheeling in the medication trolley after tea. But Barber’s approach to jazz heritage was always a studious one, in contrast to the party-band attitude of some of his contemporaries on the hotel function suite circuit in the 1960s, and Brandsma maintains that academic approach, with chapter and verse on the origins of the tunes and their place in the long history of the band.
The Dutchman and his colleagues in the reeds section, Edinburgh man Ian Killoran and the positively youthful-looking Nick White, often have the best of the music, thanks to the arrangements by the man depping for Barber on trombone, Bob Hunt. Opening, of course, with Bourbon Street Parade, and closing with When the Saints, White channelled Monty Sunshine on Petite Fleur and Brandsma arguably added the solo of the evening to Ellington’s Jubilee Stomp. In (and for) this company, however, Miles Davis’s All Blues was a bit of a stretch.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel