Jet Harris
English musician (1939–2011)
Terence "Jet" Harris (6 July 1939 – 18 March 2011) was an English rock and roll musician. He was an original member of Cliff Richard's backing band the Shadows, serving as the bass guitarist from the group's inception until April 1962, after which he had success as a soloist and as a duo with that band's drummer, Tony Meehan.
Early life
Terence Harris, the only child of Bill and Winifred Harris, was born at Kingsbury Maternity Hospital, Honeypot Lane, Kingsbury, North West London, England. His prowess as a sprinter at Dudden Hill secondary modern school earned him the nickname Jet.
Although he learned to play clarinet as a teenager, he made his own four-string double bass to play in a jazz group and later graduated to a professionally made double bass. In 1958, while playing jazz with drummer Tony Crombie and his group the Rockets, Harris received a Framus bass guitar from Crombie and became one of the first British exponents of the instrument.
He played in several groups, including the British skiffle group, the Vipers, and with the Most Brothers (featuring future music producer Mickie Most).
Cliff Richard and the Shadows
In 1959, he joined Cliff Richard's backing group, then known as "the Drifters", who, in July 1959 at a meeting in the Six Bells pub in Ruislip, changed their name to the Shadows at Harris's suggestion, in order to avoid a legal injunction from the U.S. band, who at the time unbeknownst to its members shared the same name. In 1959, after the neck of his Framus was terminally damaged in a dressing room accident, Harris was presented by the importers with a Fender Precision Bass, one of the first to come to Britain from the United States.
Other sources state that Cliff Richard gave Jet the first Fender Bass (a "Sunburst") guitar in the UK in 1960, about a year after band-mate Hank Marvin got his first red Fender Stratocaster guitar.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jet Harris” as english musician (1939–2011). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as english musician (1939–2011). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q709928. VIAF identifies the subject as 39573712. The Library of Congress control number is nb99177500. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 2011, 1962 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jet Harris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.