"You couldn't ask for more - in terms of excitement, sophistication or depth – from orchestral jazz" Jazz Review

"Rich, satisfying music...flawlessly played by a whip smart ensemble" Vortex Jazz

"Probably the greatest trumpet virtuoso that British jazz has ever produced" (The Observer), Guy Barker is truly a musician for all seasons and tastes. His collaborations read like a never-ending list of the great and good - he arranged jazz standards for Anthony Minghella's hit movie The Talented Mr Ripley; he has worked on disc and in concert with jazz legends like Gil Evans and Clark Terry, and pop icons including Frank Sinatra and Sting; he also served as music director of the BBC Jazz Awards.

Guy Barker has long had a parallel interest in classical music. Re-imagining Mozart's The Magic Flute, he transposed the opera into a New York gangster-themed jazz-dance piece that Britain's influential GQ magazine included in its recent list of 100 Best Things in the World. Featuring wonderful solos and ensemble writing with a heart-rending story, Barker and his band have produced an award-winning recording and live concert that has already had international critics tripping over their superlatives.

The Amadeus Project is boundary-breaking artistry that every music lover will enjoy.

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Jazzing up Mozart with Guy Barker
by Clive Davis

London audiences are growing accustomed to seeing Guy Barker in unexpected settings. The most versatile jazz musician of his generation, he even enjoyed a moment of fame as a film actor when he and his trumpet played a cameo role in a nightclub scene in the late Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley. More recently he joined the rising young American star Melody Gardot on stage as musical conductor and guest soloist when she performed her gorgeous album, My One and Only Thrill. And a few months before that, Barker took over that Soho landmark, Ronnie Scott’s Club for an ambitious week-long residency which included the Mozart-inspired compositions in his 2010 Festival programme.

As we all know, jazz and the classical realm have had a lengthy if sometimes turbulent relationship. The young George Gershwin may have achieved immortality with Rhapsody in Blue – composed at high speed for an evening of new compositions performed by the immensely popular Paul Whiteman Orchestra – but the number of works which have lasted more than a handful of performances is tiny. Given that jazz was long regarded as little more than novelty music by many in the classical establishment, it should come as no surprise that, for decades, musicians were discouraged from crossing between the two genres.

There was no mistaking the change of mood heralded by the advent of Wynton Marsalis in the lare 1970s, a single-minded virtuoso who was as comfortable hurtling through a Haydn trumpet cadenza as he was playing blistering hard bop solos with bandleader Art Blakey. Appointed to the helm of Lincoln Center's ambitious jazz programme, Marsalis has embarked on a sequence of orchestral compositions which have won the respect of so-called "straight" critics.

In some respects, the self-effacing Barker – four years Marsalis's senior – has emerged as his British equivalent, a flawless technician who is increasingly drawn to the challenge of working on a larger palette. In a career spanning three decades or more, Barker has mastered a dazzling range of roles, firing bop salvoes alongside the grand old man of British jazz, Stan Tracey, playing the blues in the company of that R&B legend Georgie Fame, and directing orchestras alongside singers as gifted as Gardot or the veteran American expatriate Madeline Bell.

In the first stage of his career, it was as a soloist that he made his reputation. Born in west London in 1957, Barker briefly studied at the Royal College of Music before the steady flow of assignments lured him away. He served part of his apprenticeship in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, a long-running group which has produced no end of talent. Barker remained with Bill Ashton's band of young gunslingers until he was 21, although he also found time to take lessons with the venerable American trumpeter, Clark Terry. In the years that followed, the youngster seemed to turn up everywhere, squeezing in assignments with Sting and Frank Sinatra alongside his innumerable jazz outings. In the mid-1990s he achieved the ultimate accolade when he was signed to lengendary Verve Records. Into the Blue, his debut for the company, soon found its way onto the Mercury Prize shortlist.

In youthful middle age, he has gravitated towards larger-scale compositions. And in the process he has increasingly celebrated the legacy of film noir - an apt obsession for a musician who is the son of a stuntman and an actress. Barker had hinted at his potential on the extended composition Sounds in Black and White – a homage to the twilight realm of heroes and villains and anti-heroes which was the centrepiece of his 2002 album Soundtrack. The project brought Barker another Mercury nomination.

As is only to be expected with a jazzman, the genesis of The Amadeus Project contained an element of improvised good fortune. It was during an earlier visit to Hong Kong that the idea of composing pieces with a Mozartian connection was first mooted. A devotee of classical music, Barker was intrigued, but too busy touring to commit himself to the notion. Then, as luck would have it, he received an offer to perform at San Diego's "Mainly Mozart" festival, an invitation conditional on having some Mozart-related material to perform.

As he later confessed on the bandstand at Ronnie Scott's, Barker was no Mozart devotee, and was more attracted by the prospect of temporarily becoming another of California's lotus-eaters. The idea for a sequence of pieces, The Amadeus Suite, was sown nonetheless, Barker sketching themes, including Les Trois Dames and Pamina's Portrait, loosely inspired by characters from the operas rather than the music itself. Purists should brace themselves to see Barker wrench the personae into radically different settings which are far removed from the traditions of the opera house. Just as Duke Ellington turned Shakespeare's characters into archetypes of blues and swing on his 1950s album Such Sweet Thunder, so Barker is working in a resolutely jazzy idiom. You might say that his Mozart is much closer to the roguish figure in the Peter Shaffer play than the creator of The Requiem.

It was the first stage of what was to be a long and complex journey. After the success of his San Diego commission, Barker found himself invited back in 2006 to perform an expanded version of the suite to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. At the same time, he conceived a grander work scripted by thriller writer Rob Ryan – one of Barker's neighbours - which would transpose the otherworldly storyline of The Magic Flute to the sort of New York landscape in which the irrepressible Mickey Spillane loved to spill blood and wisecracks. In this version, Tamino was re-invented as ambitious young trumpeter and the Queen of the Night ruled the roost at a brothel. With actor Michael Brandon supplying the gumshoe narration, the result was a mixture of brassy swing and unabashed schmaltz. The opera world's enfant terrible, director Peter Sellars, once scandalized traditionalists by setting Così fan tutte in a diner. Barker proved that he could be every bit as irreverent.

Clive Davis writes on music and the arts for The Times and The Sunday Times. His blog can be found at www.spectator.co.uk/clivedavis