Martin Taylor and Guy Barker – Friends Reunited
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Two of the grand masters of contemporary British jazz, multi-award winning guitarist Martin Taylor and celebrated trumpeter/arranger/composer Guy Barker, unite this month for a spectacular orchestral jazz Prom that has been a lifetime in the making.
Alyn Shipton discovers how, from their first tentative steps into jazz, their teenage ambitions and latter day musical dreams have finally been fulfilled
When Martin Taylor and his group Spirit of Django take to the stage for a Jazz Prom at the Royal Albert Hall on 31 August, along with the Britten Sinfonia and the Guy Barker Big Band, it will be the London reunion of two musicians who first played together 40 years ago. Back then, Guy was the 14-year old solo trumpeter with the Harrow Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Martin — a couple of years older — joined the band as a guitarist. In fact, Martin remembers the trepidation with which he approached his first rehearsal with the band.
“I was very nervous,” he laughs. “I was out of my depth, because at that point I couldn’t read music. I’d grown up playing music, though, and I had a pretty good ear, so I thought I’d bluff through it like a musical Arthur Daley. I remember Guy stood out. The other trumpeters were struggling a bit, but on our first concert Guy played ‘Li’l Darling’ and his solo was absolutely fantastic. My dad, who’d been drafted in to play bass with the band said to Ray Crane who ran it, said; ‘That lad’s good on the trumpet. He’ll go far!’”
Ironically, if Martin felt nervous about playing in the band, Guy was, if anything even more worried. “The trumpeter Ray Crane started the group,” recalls Guy. “He got a few professionals in to help, and I joined right at the beginning, because I’d been playing in a brass band and I wanted to try my hand at jazz. I was given the second trumpet part, and we sat up on the stage in this school hall with the rhythm section down on the floor of the hall below us, round the piano. We played a tune called ‘Walkin’ The Blues’, and it all made sense to me until halfway down the page, where there were all these hieroglyphics. It seemed to me like a coded language, ‘Dm7, G7, B flat’ and so on. And after what seemed like forever, but might have been just a few seconds, I realised these were the chords for the piano player. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh no! They make this stuff up as they go along! That’s impossible!’”
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #166 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...