Guy Barker: ‘all the rock’n’rollers love Charles Mingus’

April 22nd marks 100 years since the birth of Charles Mingus, the great American bassist, composer and bandleader, and to celebrate the occasion, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra has commissioned star UK trumpeter and arranger Guy Barker to orchestrate some of Mingus' best-loved music, to be performed in Dublin (Thursday 21st) and Cork (Friday 22nd). The occasion also marks Barker's appointment as associate artist with the RTE CO, following his triumphant appearance with the orchestra in 2019, conducting his own arrangements of Miles Davis' iconic Kind of Blue.

Larger than life is a phrase that could have been invented for Charles Mingus. A bear of a man with a wicked, often forked tongue, a voracious sexual appetite, and a reputation for irascibility, even violence, Mingus was one of the most inspirational and dynamic of the golden generation of African-American musicians that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Deeply influenced by pioneering black artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, with whom he collaborated, but just two years younger than the great innovator of modern jazz, Charlie Parker, with whom he also performed, Mingus is like a bridge joining the two eras. His music, imbued with the declarative joy of gospel, the headlong momentum of swing, the earthy jangle of the blues and the harmonic sophistication of be-bop, is unique and instantly recognisable, and hugely respected by jazz musicians and composers. And yet, perhaps because of the politically subversive stances he adopted during his life and his fearsome personal style, Mingus has never enjoyed the kind of prestige that is accorded to these other greats.

But as the jazz world marks the centenary of his birth, perhaps that is beginning to change. Guy Barker certainly thinks so.

“Mingus is acknowledged by a very interesting group of people,” he says, speaking to the Irish Times by Zoom, sitting at his piano surrounded by the scatter of charts he has been labouring over for the past few months. “He just seems to touch certain people. For instance, all the rock’n’rollers love Mingus. You talk to them, and the Mingus thing is very deep in them”.

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Barker would know. Though he may spend most of his time these days composing and arranging, the London-born musician was once the first-call trumpeter on the London recording scene, and he has rubbed musical shoulders with everyone from jazz legends (Gil Evans, Quincy Jones), to vocal icons (Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé) to rock stars (Paul Weller, Sting).

Passing the baton

Barker references another of his former employers, Elvis Costello, who has put lyrics to several Mingus tunes, including Weird Nightmare, which Costello performed on Deep Dead Blue, a live duo album recorded with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell in 1995. But there are many others. The sound world of Tom Waits albums such as Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years owe a debt to Mingus’s atmosphere of feral collective improvisation. Most significantly, Joni Mitchell formed a close friendship with Mingus in the last years of his life – he died at the age of 56 from motor neuron disease – and her 1979 album entitled Mingus captures the great bassist in his final months, still searching, still creating, passing the baton to jazz icons of the next generation, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius.

“There is just something about him that is just so special, ” says Barker. Though he has been listening to Mingus since his teens, he has enjoyed re-immersing himself in the bassist’s music over the past couple of years. “Sometimes there’d be this feeling, the way the band all moved around, and it was like lines of emotion. With Mingus, there was a feeling that everybody was partaking in the composition of the piece”.

Like many of the great leaders of jazz’s classic period, Mingus hired the sort of musicians who would bring their own ideas to the music – notable artists in their own right such as saxophonist Eric Dolphy and pianist Jaki Byard – and as a composer, Mingus mined the self-expression of his musicians to forge his own alloy. It’s a feeling that Barker has tried to work into his new arrangements.

“The thing is, these are for an orchestra and a big band, but I never write for them as separate things. I like to give the opportunity to the members of the orchestra to play things that they may not have played before, but also to write it in a way so it will make sense to them. There’s some of Jaki Byard’s introductions that I have orchestrated, and sometimes I’ve given Mingus’s actual bass line to the bass player. There’s one particular section where I have all the strings playing in unison with Mingus’s bass line.”

Standing ovation

It's an approach that has worked well for Barker in the past. His Kind of Blue arrangements prompted a standing ovation at the National Concert Hall, and audiences in Dublin and Cork will be treated to a reprise of those arrangements alongside the new Mingus material. As someone who has served time on both sides of the podium, Barker understands musicians, and he has clearly developed a strong connection with the members of the RTÉ CO.

“I really liked the orchestra”, he says, remembering his first job conducting the orchestra for a Valentine’s Day concert at the National Concert Hall in 2014. “Of course the playing is great, but just the attitude of everybody, it’s just a lovely situation to be in, I found it so calming. I’m just another member of the band but, you know, my improvisation is with eighty five people.”

Alongside the evident talent, both as a composer/arranger and as a trumpeter, you sense that charm has always been part of Barker’s bag as a musician. You don’t get the call from Sting or Sinatra unless you’re easy to work with. And though he has been moving in exalted circles since his career as a trumpeter began in the late 1980s, when he drops names, it is with the breathless amazement of someone who can’t quite believe where his career has taken him. There was the time that Quincy Jones asked for a copy of one of his arrangements. Or the time he hung out with Jude Law and Matt Damon on the set of his friend Anthony Minghella’s film The Talented Mr Ripley, for which he supplied some of the music.

But even by Barker’s standards, the story of how he started arranging for large ensembles in the first place ends with a name-drop on a whole other level. A lifelong fan of film music – his mother was an actress and his father was a stuntman – in 2002 he wrote some music for his own septet inspired by film noir, and was approached by the Barbican to write an arrangement of it for full orchestra. For his own amusement, he had assigned the different instruments in the piece to different film-noir actors

"You know," he says laughing, "Cary Grant was the tenor sax, Lauren Bacall was the alto sax, Edward G Robinson was the trombone, people like that."

After the Barbican concert, he was invited to a party by a member of the audience who turned out to be celebrated theatre director Jude Kelly. As you do. “She invited me to this dinner party with a lot of artists and interesting people. So we were there, and she got up and I could see her talking to someone on the phone, and I heard her say ‘Yeah, it was really good, and you’re in it’, and then she said ‘I’ve got the composer here, do you want to speak to him?’, and she hands me the phone and says ‘Guy, it’s Lauren Bacall’.

Barker collapses in laughter at the absurdity of it all. “So I was on the phone for five minutes with Lauren Bacall and she was wonderful. And the best thing she said, she said ‘tell me about this piece’ and I said ‘I wrote this for seven musicians, but then I orchestrated it for a full orchestra’, and she said ‘That’s the one I want to hear, because I’ve always said that the more musicians the better’. And that stayed with me!”

Mingus would no doubt approve.

Jazz Legends: Charles Mingus 100th and Miles Davis Kind Of Blue is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on 21 April and Cork Opera House on 22 April. More at nch.ie and corkoperahouse.ie