Dave Douglas finds inspiration in the oddest places, such as the work and tragic life of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, writes Ray Comiskey

Few, I imagine, would resist the notion that Dave Douglas is a hugely significant musician in contemporary jazz. The sheer size, scope and high-level consistency of his work are intimidating to contemplate. He finds inspiration anywhere. A field full of half a million refugees near the border between Italy and former Yugoslavia or the war-ravaged lives of Bosnian children can stir him creatively, as much as a piece by Stravinsky, Messiaen, Tailleferre, Schumann, Ellington, Roland Kirk or Mary Lou Williams.

That's why, on the surface, it seems surprising that for Keystone, the band he brings to open the Bray Jazz Festival on Friday, he went back to Hollywood's silent era and the one- and two-reel comedies of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle for inspiration. Although, in his day, Arbuckle was as big as Chaplin and Keaton - he signed a deal worth $1 million a year with Paramount in 1921 - he has been eclipsed over time by his more celebrated contemporaries.

For someone as widely read and as politically engaged as Douglas, if he was going to delve into the silent era, Chaplin, it might have seemed, would offer more sustenance. It was Chaplin, after all, who dipped his toe into the pool of communism in the 1940s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) led the Reds-under-the-beds Hollywood witch-hunts and Richard Nixon and senator Joe McCarthy jumped on the bandwagon. Hurt by public hostility in America, Chaplin departed to Switzerland in the early 1950s.

When you think of it, though, Chaplin was less a prisoner of conscience than of his egotism and disdain. And there is, too, a kind of iciness about the films that made him famous; they inhabit an airless world of their author's creation. It's removed from human warmth or sympathy, which is not something that could be said for Douglas's music, even at its most ideologically inspired.

So why, in the first place, did he gravitate to Arbuckle's films and the Keystone idea, which resulted in the band he brings to Bray, the music and the album of the same name?

"I think, for me," he says, "the thing that's really unique about this band and the idea of the project is more the interaction with film and visual art that caused me to write this music. And I think people can listen to the record without the movies. It's very pictorial. I ended up working with some very, very old film, because first of all I just liked the surface quality, the grainy black-and-white images.

"But I also feel like there's a sweetness in these films that's not often in cinema. There's a very loving, nurturing, warm aspect to these films, and it made me feel that they could be approached on that level. In other words, the narrative in these Arbuckle films is not the number one important thing. They contribute a sense of emotion; there's a sense of playfulness about them."

He's right about the cavalier attitude to telling the story in Arbuckle's old silents, and they lack the streak of cruelty that runs through so many of Chaplin's comedies.

"I would agree with that," he answers, "but I also think you're one of the rare people that I have ever heard say that, especially about the Arbuckle films. I have to say that, when I first discovered his films I thought 'oh, well, this is interesting'. But at the end of the day it was when I learned about his life story that I became more compelled and I felt more of a drive to respond specifically to the films. It's a tragic story. By all accounts he was a wonderful man destroyed by the film studios."

It was one of the first great Hollywood scandals. Shortly after signing his million-a-year contract with Paramount, Arbuckle and two friends left Los Angeles for San Francisco, where they began partying on Monday, September 3rd, 1921 in the St Francis Hotel. Although it was the Prohibition era, they had no trouble getting alcohol delivered. Over the next three days a wild party developed in which a young actress, Virginia Rappe, developed abdominal pains and went to the bathroom in Arbuckle's suite to get sick. She didn't go to hospital for three days and died that Friday in hospital of a ruptured bladder.

Another woman at the party, "Bambina" Maude Delmont, who had a history of setting up the famous to blackmail them, claimed Arbuckle had raped Rappe so violently - some newspaper versions had him using an alcohol bottle and said his weight on top of her was also a factor - that his alleged actions had caused the fatal injuries.

Within days he was arrested and charged with manslaughter. The case against him was thin and his first trial, in November 1921, resulted in a hung jury, 10-2 in favour of acquittal. After much lurid publicity the second trial also produced a 10-2 hung jury, this time in favour of conviction. The third trial, in March 1922, saw the main prosecution witness, Zey Prevon, escape from house arrest and skip the country.

Arbuckle was acquitted after a few minutes' deliberation by the jury, which, unusually, issued a fulsome declaration of his innocence and an acknowledgement of the suffering he had been caused by the coverage of the episode in William Randolph Hearst's newspapers.

Arbuckle, however, was ruined. Paramount wouldn't touch him and theatres all over the US refused to screen his films. Will Hays, just installed as the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, seized the opportunity to push his campaign to clean up the movie industry and banned Arbuckle from the screen.

Everyone had an agenda, I suggested to Douglas; Delmont, Hays, the prosecuting DA, Matthew Brady, who was planning to run for governor, and Hearst.

"You mentioned Hearst," he responds. "You know he was the beginning, really, of tabloid journalism? So there's actually a very poignant story that, years later, Arbuckle, after he had been exonerated, but his career in films had been destroyed, approached Hearst and said: 'Why did you do this? Why did you destroy me?' And Hearst said: 'Oh, it was nothing personal. It was just to sell newspapers.'"

Despite the fact that he later directed a few films as William Goodrich, and friends such as Buster Keaton stood by him, Arbuckle was essentially a movie footnote by the time he died, of a heart attack, in 1933. He was 46.

ALTHOUGH ONE OF THE pieces he composed for the Keystone project, The Real Roscoe, is a moving response to the man, Douglas's music is about the films, rather than the tragedy. And there's another motive behind the project.

"I found myself frustrated with all of the normal music that gets added, years later, to these old films. There's an old-style, funky, fun piano thing that comes on." So, when he took away that music and played around with his own ideas, he says, "in a way, the images jumped on the screen and came to life.

"A lot of people who know these films think that it's very unusual and essentially blasphemous, what I'm doing. But that's my rationale - not that I even need a rationale, but I think for somebody looking to understand what we're doing it's helpful."

Unlike Miles Davis, who had his band improvise to screen images for Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud, Douglas didn't adopt that approach.

"As a matter of fact, I asked the band not to watch the screen at the time. I feel that the scenes in the film don't need our help. They're very clear. It's better when you don't try to match the pratfalls. What I did was, for each film, I sat down and watched it many times and developed a sort of timeline for what I wanted to do."

He started to write themes that would match the action, but that would also, by echoing the spontaneity of these silent comedies, encourage the musicians to be spontaneous, too. Was he conscious of the trap that music can sometimes tell you what to feel about what you're seeing?"That's right," he answers. "I'm not a big fan of that. That's exactly like just what you're saying - that you feel you're being manipulated by the score."

The instrumentation he chose is slightly unusual. To the standard trumpet-saxophone and rhythm quintet line-up he has added turntables spun by DJ Olive. He has always been keen on bringing new sounds to jazz improvisation, "of not getting stuck in a rut". And he felt he hadn't heard turntables used in improvised music before.

"There's a poppy aspect to it, and I guess it's important, because I love it. I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do. I also always write for personalities, so I can't discount the fact that I like to work with people I admire. Part of it is the people that I want to work with."And, he says, laughing, "hopefully we'll be having a good time playing it".

Dave Douglas and Keystone will open the Bray Jazz Festival at the Mermaid Arts Centre on Friday. www.brayjazz.com