Dave Jazzman Chamberlain: Biography

Dave’s earliest musical experiences were singing with an award-winning choir at Belper Pottery First School in Belper, Derbyshire and learning the trumpet with his father, an engineer with a brass band background who moonlighted at weekends on trumpet and bass guitar with a cabaret act across the Northern working men’s club circuit throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The trumpet was never the instrument of choice though, and from the age of 10 Dave was jamming on the guitar and bass guitar, writing his own songs and forming bands with schoolmates. Formal classical tuition on guitar and double bass began when Dave was 16. 

Around this time, Dave’s exposure to jazz came with a television documentary about the music of Django Reinhardt. After seeing this, Dave began learning and transcribing Django’s solos, not understanding that this is the best way to learn to play jazz. Recordings by Charlie Parker and Wes Montgomery soon became part of his essential playlist.   

Dave moved to London in the mid-1990s to study music at Goldsmiths College. The guitar was put aside in favour of the bass, which provided better opportunities for performing with orchestras, chamber groups and big bands. A jazz scholarship at Trinity College of Music came next, and Dave studied with Simon Woolf, with trips to Paris for lessons with Pierre Boussaguet. His main influences at that time were the great bassists Jimmy Blanton, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers and Sam Jones.

This led to a busy performing career as an in-demand sideman for UK jazz performers, often in the mainstream or post-bop styles, as well as visiting American jazz stars like Scott Hamilton, Harry Allen, Ken Peplowski, Kenny Davern and John Colianni. Dave also spent seven years touring the world and recording as a regular member of Blue Note recording artist Stacey Kent’s band and was featured in the rhythm sections of big bands and orchestras including the BBC Big Band, the John Wilson Orchestra, the RTE Concert Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. 

After a decade as a full-time jazz double bassist, Dave became restless for further study and for wider life experiences and went back to college to study law in 2008. This led to a second career in legal and professional services. However, the musical flame was never extinguished and survives today in Dave’s ongoing musical journey with the guitar, an instrument he rediscovered around 2010, and the plectrum banjo, an instrument which he has been investigating voraciously since his discovery of Eddie Peabody’s music around 2015, and which is now a key part of his expressive toolkit.  With the commissioning of a hand-made Mastervox Plectrum Banjo by German master luthier Norbert Pietsch in 2025, Dave’s transition from bass to guitar and banjo has now come full circle. 

His current musical preoccupation is with developing a style and sound which harks back to the vaudevillian entertainments of the 1920s, updated to incorporate later jazz influences and contemporary musical and social themes. As well as Peabody, Dave is schooled in the music of the great guitarists especially Eddie Lang, Freddie Green, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Bucky Pizzarelli and Chet Atkins. For Dave, musical performance is all about making a connection with an audience and telling a story, and he aspires to fulfil this mission with every note he plays.