It sounded good to me at the time of release, and sounds even better now - particularly the five-part suite which occupies the second half of the CD, Sounds In Black And White.

This fine extended composition is Barker's tribute to film noir, and is essentially a soundtrack waiting for a screenplay to be written for it.

And someone should write it. The character sketches are already to be found in the music, and it reminds us that jazz and film have traditionally gone well together over the decades - in fact almost from the inception of both forms.

In the early days of silent movies, rags and jazzy interpretations of popular tunes were staples of the piano accompanists' repertoires. The first talkie, starring Al Jolson in 1927, was entitled The Jazz Singer, although that description of the protagonist is stretching a point, and jazz musicians played on movie soundtracks from the late 1920s onwards. Bessie Smith made her only appearance on film in St Louis Blues in 1929.

Throughout the swing era, big bands played film music, and a little later jazz musicians and their bohemian lifestyles became popular subjects for the movies. In the 1950s generally poor biopics such as The Benny Goodman Story, The Gene Krupa story and The Five Pennies - about cornetist Red Nichols - nevertheless had great soundtracks, although it took until 1986 for Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight to demonstrate it was possible for one of those great soundtracks - in this case scored by Herbie Hancock who had earlier provided the music for Antonioni's Blow Up - to be matched to an equally great film.

This was thanks in no small part to Dexter Gordon's superb performance as a doomed saxophone player adrift in Paris, and to the casting of several other musicians, French and American, playing themselves.

Paris was a perfect setting for the story. A compelling harmony exists between jazz saxophone and the French capital, a point which Gato Barbieri underlined in 1973 with his contributions to the soundtrack of Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris.

That connection was firmly established in 1964 when Henry Mancini employed Plas Johnson to play that unforgettable riff in The Pink Panther, which became the theme tune for Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but perhaps the greatest Paris jazz soundtrack is the one dominated by the plaintive half valving of Miles Davis' trumpet. Louis Malle's 1957 exercise in claustrophobic tension, Ascenseur Pour l'Echafaud, features some of Davies' most expressive playing.

Another fine and generally overlooked jazz soundtrack - heavily influenced by Davis' star sideman of the period, John Coltrane - is Richard Rodney Bennett's soundtrack to another Peter Sellers comedy, 1962's The Wrong Arm Of The Law. It's an unmistakable homage to Coltrane's Blue Train album played by British musicians.

In 1966, however, when director Lewis Gilbert wanted to put a little jazzy muscle into the soundtrack to Alfie - the film that made a star of Michael Caine - he opted for the real thing. Sonny Rollins was brought over to England for the sessions.

Woody Allen has used jazz, often played by his own band, in many of his movies from 1973's Sleeper onwards, and made particularly telling use of Django Reinhardt's music in Sweet And Lowdown and Stardust Memories and of Gershwin in Manhattan.

As for Barker, his movie career began when he and his band made cameo appearances in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, playing a few period jazz standards. Soundtrack points to a promising secondary career as a film composer for him.

Though not, I hope, one that will prevent him persevering with this latest detour into broadcasting. Barker is a witty and erudite jazz authority with a gift for infecting those who listen to him with his own irrepressible enthusiasm. Those shows should be well worth hearing.