Rob Ryan outside Ronnie Scott’s in Frith Street and, inset, jazz trumpeter Guy Barker

RONNIE Scott’s has a hard-earned reputation as a jazz club for the purist, a place where the greats of the genre consider hallowed ground.

And while every performer brings a carefully honed aesthetic, Ronnie’s is never a case of style – which comes in spades – over substance, which comes by the skip load. So a new show penned by our jazz columnist, author Rob Ryan, is something of a departure from the norm for the Frith Street venue.

Working with trumpeter Guy Barker – a celebrated arranger and composer who has worked with names ranging from everyone from Frank Sinatra to Sting, Wham! to Paul Weller – Rob is creating a first for the jazz venue – turning the stage into a theatre for a big-band drama.

As Rob explains, where you usually are fixated by soaring notes, the action on stage in their new show, Inferno 67, features “murder, The Beatles, shrunken heads, John Coltrane, star-crossed lovers, King Lear narrating and the Devil”.

Guy says he hopes the show will be a jolt to the audience – and is a hand-brake-turn of a departure from what Guy Barker gig-goers would usually expect.

Guy curates Jazz Voice, the opening event of the London Jazz Festival in November, and also puts together a big-band Christmas show at the Royal Albert Hall.

“I’ve been creating these for a few years now, and loads of people come, and they’re big venues, and it’s very audience friendly,” says the musician. “I thought it was time for something darker. So, I went and talked to Rob.”

Rob, who has written numerous novels and screenplays, is a long-term collaborator with Barker. “I said to him, ‘I want to do something right on the edge’,” says the composer. “I want to do something where, when I look over my shoulder, I can see members of the audience leaving. And Rob said to me, ‘You don’t mean that, but I know exactly what you mean’.”

The collaborative process began with Guy having a sense of what he wanted to achieve, how he wanted the show to feel, and the themes within.

Rob, who lives in Dartmouth Park, said: “Guy gave me an idea for me to flesh out into a narrative to hang the music on. In this case, it was to create an episode of the Twilight Zone as if it had been directed by David Lynch. He then threw in some characters he’d like in there and a few musical clues. He’d say ‘There has to be a scene in a nightclub with a sleazy tango playing.’ Or ‘There is this beautiful, witchy woman who loves avant garde jazz… and whisky’.”

The piece is called Inferno 67, a title inspired by the 1954 Don Siegel film Private Hell 36 about two dodgy coppers who steal $80,000 from a dead robber – and then face the consequences of their greed.

Drawing on classic film noir, Inferno 67 brings in a vast range of musical genres: flavours of tango through the Burt Bacharach pop, Sixties soul and funk as well as big band jazz.

But as the pair moulded the story and added flesh to their early ideas, the production process grew in tandem.

Guy adds: “As the project got bigger, with narrator and actors, everyone was saying we need a theatre for this. But I wanted to do it at Ronnie’s, because it has been my second home since I was 15. I just sat down and told them exactly what it was – which is basically like nothing they had done before. And Ronnie’s said: ‘We don’t know how it’ll fit on the stage, but we want to do this – we’ll make it work’.”

Guy knew he wanted his regular, powerhouse big band to be the engine of the piece, and then he looked at who to cast.
Stage actor Demetri Goritsas was soon on board as a cop in the show – and was shown Ronnie’s space so he knew what they were looking to do.

“We took him into Ronnie’s and said ‘This is what it is. This is the stage. We have to fit in 18 musicians, a narrator, two singers and two actors here’.”

Kentish Town-based actor Emer Kenny read the script and after laughing “long and hard, said she would channel a suitably witchy vibe for the mysterious Cassandra,” adds Rob.

Further cast appointments saw The Crown, Star Wars and Black Panther actor Danny Sapani sign up. Sapani moved to Islington aged 15 and signed up to study drama at the weekend Arts College.

“It was at Interchange Studios where Talacre is now, although it later moved to Hampstead Town Hall on Haverstock Hill,” he reveals. “It was co-founded by an inspirational woman called Celia Greenwood, who used to be the drama teacher at Acland Burghley school.

“Celia believed that arts training should be a right, not a privilege. And so, she set up the Weekend Arts College. All lessons were a pound. You could learn any instrument and you try any of the performing arts vocations.

“And so many great people came out of there. Courtney Pine, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Sophie Okonedo, Julian Joseph, Ms Dynamite, myself, Daniel Kaluuya – the list is just endless.

“Ann Mitchell was teaching there and Ian Carr [Miles Davis’s biographer and leader of the legendary fusion band Nucleus] was a jazz tutor.”

Danny graduated from WAC and attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage where he was a year above Demetri.

The Guy Barker Big Band featuring Joe Stilgoe – who has written witty, urbane lyrics for some of the songs – takes over Ronnie Scott’s on September 17-19 with two shows a night.

As Rob says: “Anyone going to Ronnie’s expecting a sedate piano trio will be in for a surprise. If nothing else, it’ll be a lot of fun.”

• Inferno 67 tickets on https://www.ronniescotts.co.uk/find-a-show/guy-barker