“I love the venue.” Fergus McCreadie has had a particular affection for Band on the Wall in Manchester since performing there for the first time in the wake of his 2022 Mercury Prize nomination. His trio with David Bowden and Stephen Henderson is among the bands playing for the 2025 autumn season – they will play the venue as part of the launch tour for their new album, “The Shieling”.
Fergus McCreadie describes Band on the Wall as one of his favourite places to play. The Manchester venue, he says, has not just a good piano – something pianists always hope for – and also a good energy, and a friendly, professional team who run it…. but there’s also more:
“There’s something about it. It kind of like feels like a club, but it’s got a nice concert vibe as well. I really like it,” he confirmed.
This November’s concert in the Band on the Wall’s autumn series is part of the launch tour for a new album, “The Shieling”, their fifth for Edition Records, which will be released on 24 October.
A shieling, McCreadie explains, is a Scots word for “a ramshackle building used by farmers over the past centuries – I think in different regions it means slightly different things…”
The new album will be a continuation of the trio’s work, blending jazz and Scottish traditional music in an innovative way, but at the same time, in some ways, it will represent new departures from it.
The first difference is in the circumstances of the recording. Whereas the trio’s previous albums have been recorded at James Macmillan’s QuietMoney Studios in Hastings, “The Shieling” was recorded in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides in the winter of 2024/5. “There isn’t a studio there,” says McCreadie, “or if there is, we didn’t use it.” The trio went to the more intimate space a croft, where they recorded, the members of the trio and the engineer all together in a small room with an upright piano. “Sonically, it sounds quite different in that living room,” says McCreadie.
In addition to the different sound that the circumstances of recording inevitably encourage, there is a different feel in other ways too. Shorter tracks, for example. “Every album I’ve done so far, I think, has had at least a couple of quite long tracks with a lot of blowing,” says McCreadie. “There’s not really that kind of thing on this album. Everything’s quite focused on being concise and telling the story that just needs to be told without lots of extraneous notes, necessarily.”
An important influence on this new direction was Laura Jurd, who came out to North Uist, and is co-producer of the album.
One significant aspect of Fergus McCreadie’s activity as musician is that he has the trio, but is also part of a broader community of Scottish musicians who have known each other for years. For example, he does about half of the dates for corto.alto, and recently performed as part of a duo with Matt Carmichael at the Glasgow Jazz Festival. Such grounding is important to him: “In every band that I’m in now, I’ve been playing with the musicians for a really long time. That’s the way that the Scottish jazz scene works. You spend a lot of time playing with the same people and actually that’s a really cool thing, because you develop such strong musical bonds – with everyone.”
That sense of being part of a wider, grassroots community came across strongly when I asked Fergus about the legacy of a giant of Scottish and European jazz. I asked Fergus to reflect on the great Brian Kellock, whose death at the age of just 62 has recently left the Scottish jazz community in a state of shock:
“He really was, in many ways, like the grandfather of Scottish jazz piano Everyone, all my teachers and everyone around me, and everyone coming through the generation before, they are all branches that come back to the same root – of Brian. I really looked up to him when I was young. The first time I heard Brian playing was at Edinburgh Jazz Festival, I believe. And it just completely blew my mind. I mean, it sounded like, it sounded like the old records, in a way that I hadn’t heard in Scotland up to that point. I must have been 13 or 14. I remember leaving the gig thinking “I have so much practice to do….” I would have loved to have studied with him at some point, but he didn’t really go for teaching… so I never got the chance to ask him about his secrets. There’s so much like feel and tradition and his playing, and so much creativity as well. But the recordings are there… there’s an album with him and Liane Carroll. That’s a great, great album. It’s amazing, amazing music. It is such a shame. He really wasn’t that old…It’s just, it’s very sad.”
The Fergus McCreadie Trio will be at Band on the Wall on Monday 17 November.
Other dates in the series are:
Saturday 05 July – YolanDa Brown
Monday 21 July – Lee Ritenour & Friends
Wednesday 3 September – Samba Touré
Sunday 19 October – Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio
Tuesday 21 October – Joe Armon-Jones
Sunday 14 December – Ashley Henry – – Band on the Wall | Tickets
ALSO: Thursday 25 September in The Copper Bar – Arjuna Oakes
15 October in The Copper Bar – Rosie Frater-Taylor
