Artist:     Chris Barber

Album:     A Trailblazer’s Legacy

Label:     The Last Music Co.

Release Date:     7.23.21

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Chris Barber’s story is an absolute, action-packed epic, worthy of a Ken Burns documentary or a film adaptation of the extravagant set A Trailblazer’s Legacy, willed into existence by his widow, Kate, and other loyal acolytes. Talk about a life well-lived.

Unofficially, the jazz and skiffle innovator and motor racing daredevil also served as an ambassador of sorts, greasing the skids for the 1960s British blues explosion by arranging U.K. summits with American imports such as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Musical relations between the two countries were never better.

With the band, in all its incarnations, Barber led for an astounding seven decades, the accomplished trombonist relished playing different forms of traditional jazz, with a special fondness for New Orleans variants, later throwing Balkan folk sounds and more contemporary elements into the mix. Going back further, he conspired with Lonnie Donegan to foment a skiffle revolution, with Barber’s bass helping drive the folky uprising. Tributes poured in for Barber after his passing earlier this year, and Bill Wyman and others have articulated how The Beatles and the Stones, along with other iconic English rock acts, owed their very existence to Barber.

A Trailblazer’s Legacy, then, is wholly appropriate, a fully loaded homage lavishly packaging four CDs worth of recordings into a hardcover book with 150 photos, plus a thoroughly annotated discography and writings from Barber’s biographer Alyn Shipton. With academic rigor and a historian’s appreciation for significant detail, Shipton traces Barber’s artistic development and contextualizes the 60-some musical selections that made the cut. A section celebrating Barber’s racing exploits also gets its day in the sun.

Then, there’s the music, mostly consisting of vintage jazz standards boldly interpreted and inventively and immaculately arranged. Courtesy of Barber’s myriad outfits, like Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, come lively riots of sunny Dixieland, like “Stomp Off Let’s Go,” a buoyant “Stevedore Stomp” and “Ice Cream,” that rage on, as sultry, burlesque swaggers “La Harpe St. Blues” and “Moonshine Man” and bluesy, heavy-lidded drawls “Betty and Dupree,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and “The Mountains of Mourne” lazily sashay about, banging on the walls for them to quiet down. An easy, old timey “Misty Morning” wishes they would, too.

Barber protégé Ottilie Patterson makes frequent appearances on A Trailblazer’s Legacy, singing with great feel and emotion, whereas Tharpe joyfully joins in with Barber’s Jazz Band to slip and slide through a brushed, bouncy version of “Every Time I Feel the Spirit.” Barber and his many co-conspirators often reimagined Ellingtonian pieces in interesting ways, as evidenced by this release, also a showcase for Barber’s deft chops, generous nuance and full, rounded, brassy tonality. And he was as comfortable with ragtime – see the tight, upbeat take on the Joplin classic “The Entertainer” here – as he was with skiffle, represented on A Trailblazer’s Legacy by the stringy locomotion of the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group hit “Rock Island Line.” Barber, though, left his heart in the Crescent City, this big musical menu highlighted by a dish of gloriously shambolic, simmering Second Line gumbo cooked with Van Morrison and Dr. John in “Oh! Didn’t He Ramble.” This is one memorable meal.

—Peter Lindblad