Animated by his new project

Stu Brown has found a way of making five fellow musicians very happy: he books them for a gig. It's not the financial remuneration that brings a smile to the faces of the players involved in Brown's Raymond Scott Project, however.

You may recognise Scott's notes, if not his name. His music formed the soundtrack to the Warner Bros cartoon adventures of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Road Runner, although, as Brown has discovered, there's a whole lot more to this son of Russian emigrants than merry melodies and looney tunes.

"I wasn't even aware of him through the cartoons," says Brown. "It was just by chance - when I heard a radio documentary in 1994 about Carl Stalling, who wrote the cartoon soundtracks and incorporated Scott's music into his own work - that I heard about him, and the more I heard about him as a person, the more intrigued I became."

A student of electronics by day and a drummer around Glasgow by night, Brown transcribed some of Scott's work for a band he was then playing with and promised himself that he would one day organise a fully-fledged project playing Scott's music, of which, he was discovering, there was rather a lot, and in different styles, too.

"He was amazingly prolific and not just as a composer," says Brown. "Being an electronics student, I was intrigued by the number of patents he registered for things like the first sequencer and even a photocopier he'd invented. He was also a pioneer in electronic music, making early synthesisers that paved the way for the Moog, worked in research for Tamla Motown and did other stuff."

Delve into Scott's biography and you'll find him responsible for breaking the colour bar in Holly-wood studios - saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster were among the beneficiaries.

Then there are his ballet scores, his minimalist compositions that predated Philip Glass and Terry Riley and his work as the A&R man who gave Bo Diddley his first audition. He was also responsible for the supreme jazz messenger Art Blakey giving up piano in favour of drums. Even Scott's original band had connections - his drummer, Johnny Williams, was the father of film composer John Williams.

A dozen years after becoming aware of Scott, Brown decided he had to put that project together. He contacted the Raymond Scott website (Scott had died in 1994, aged 85), explained what he had in mind and was given access to Scott's sheet music so he could form a sextet in the image of Scott's late 1930s "Quintette" - so called because Scott didn't rate himself as a pianist and saw himself as playing with five specialists.

"The problem with the Quintette is that Scott didn't write stuff down at that time," says Brown. "There's the odd sketch but mostly what he'd do was play his ideas at the piano, get the band to learn the pieces by ear and then record them. The music was never actually written with these instruments in mind and he'd basically cut and paste his ideas into compositions. So I had to transcribe a lot of old recordings and arrange them for the band we now call the Raymond Scott Project."

Choosing the musicians was easier. Brown's first thought was to call on players who would get on well together. But he also needed players who could cope with the technical requirements and play with the required sense of humour.

"The band pretty much picked itself," he says. "Martin Kershaw isn't known as a clarinettist on the Scottish jazz scene but clarinet is his first instrument - he's classically trained, so he can play the notes with ease. Tom MacNiven was the trumpet choice because he has the humour and he's studied the 1930s style and has all the mutes. It's very involved music and so well done in its original setting that we just set out to recreate it. It's just so different that even now it sounds like nothing else."

The challenge for Brown was to cover as wide an area of Scott's music as possible within the scope of a clarinet, trumpet, saxophone and rhythm section line-up.

"We reworked a few of his big band arrangements for sextet and adapted some of his electronic music, so we're covering quite a lot of his career," says Brown. "But there's a huge catalogue. The original Quintette, although it only ran for three years in the 1930s, was playing a new composition every week. That's about 150 tunes."

The CD they plan to record in April will be, says Brown, a start. In time, they may incorporate film into their concerts - they already have a short Scott biopic, made by his son, Stan Warnow (Scott chose his adopted name out of the New York phone book), which they show at gigs where possible. For now, though, Brown thinks the music stands up by itself.

"It's good fun and even if it is quite challenging for the musicians, when you see pictures of Scott's band, they're all beaming away as they play," he says. "Our guys are the same - they really love it and I think that comes across."