Pianist Fergus McCreadie, Scottish music's man of the moment

He faces stiff competition for the Mercury Prize. Harry Styles, Sam Fender, Little Simz and Wet Leg are among his fellow nominees. But it’s not improbable that he wakes on Friday with three new awards for the mantlepiece of his Dennistoun flat, the Mercury among them. So yes, it’s fair to say he is Scottish music’s man of the moment.

Right now he’s in Mono, the bar-cum-venue-cum record shop off Glasgow’s King Street, where he sits unrecognised, sipping an orange juice and conjuring a response to the question: how did he feel when he heard about the nomination and how does he feel about the wider chorus of critical acclaim which has come his way?

“The boring answer is very happy, as you would expect. I was sitting practising and I got a call from my label manager. He said you’ve been nominated for the Mercury Prize, in quite a dry tone of voice.” But, he adds, “I don’t want to let it feel like I’ve made it. I haven’t. It’s one stepping stone on the journey, isn’t it? So I try and not think about it too much”

In the world of rock and pop, the album-as-cultural-artefact idea continues to hold sway. It’s one reason there are still prizes like the Mercury and the SAY Award. But for McCreadie, as for most jazz musicians, the long player has a less exalted place in their sense of who they are as musicians. The importance crucible is the live space. It’s the performing which matters.

“I think the albums are necessary from a business perspective,” he says. “You need something to sell and something at gigs that people can remember you by other than just your name and the memory they have. But jazz albums take so little time to actually make, to be honest. It takes three days, maybe, to get an entire album finished.”

Contrast that with, say, Harry Styles. His album, Harry’s House, was recorded over two years, employed three producers, 12 co-writers and four studios on two continents, and was the foundation for a world tour which saw him perform to 50,000 people at Glasgow’s Ibrox Park in June.

“Pop artists will spend months and months in the studio and there’s much more of a cycle where they’ll do a period of recording and period of touring, whereas for us it’s one little snapshot. In six months of gigging there’ll be maybe one, two, three days of recording. John Coltrane said it nicely when he described his own albums as like chapters in a diary of a book that was never finished. That’s a nice way of thinking about it. You’re constantly capturing little snapshots of your playing. But your album’s never going to be fully your vision, whereas [playing] live is the more essential jazz experience, for definite.”

That said, McCreadie’s Forest Floor is a special piece of work, three day genesis or no. As a teenager, streaming platforms such as Spotify opened a vast musical archive to his young ears and he was able to make deep dives into the work of Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and, in particular, Oscar Peterson. “I must have listened to every one of his recordings multiple, multiple times,” he says.

He still cites those artists as influences. But to that personal canon he adds cultural and geographical specificity in the form of musical flavours drawn from Scottish traditional music, and inspiration taken from elemental aspects of the Scottish landscape. Forest Floor, for example, was inspired partly by forest walks he made during a lockdown spent at his parents’ home. And so as his glittering, often improvised piano runs float above David Bowden’s double bass and Stephen Henderson’s drums, there are moments of earwormery in the form of lilting melodies inspired by traditional Scots music.

Is he trying to create a vernacular which will blend those two forms into something entirely new? Yes and no, he says.

“You’re just trying to create the music that feels most natural to you, to play and write. For that me, since my late teens, that has always been this folk and jazz combination. That all comes in, I think. But I’d say it’s not striving for that particular sound necessarily, it’s trying to trying to strive for that sound that’s in my head.”

READ MORE: A WHO'S WHO OF SCOTLAND'S EXPLOSIVE YOUNG JAZZ TALENT

McCreadie met Bowden and Henderson in his first week as a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) in 2016 when he was drafted in to form a rhythm section with them. They were in their final year. No pressure, then. Making matters worse, the makeshift trio was to accompany Bob Mintzer, saxophonist with Grammy Award-winning fusion band Yellowjackets, who was running a masterclass and performing in a lunchtime concert. “For me that was a very scary and intimidating experience,” says McCreadie. It was also one which proved pivotal: he had found the other two members of his trio.

His own journey to RCS began with piano lessons when he was seven. But the way he tells it he was no pint-sized prodigy.

“It took a long time before I realised that was what I wanted to do. I always did like to play but I always assumed – and I think a huge amount of people assume this when they start playing an instrument – that I didn’t have ‘it’, the thing. The gift, so to speak. But I don’t think that’s real. It doesn’t exist. It’s just hard work and practice, and I never knew that.”

It took being at a Fife Summer Jazz School and being told that every teacher there had done tens of thousands of hours of practice before he realised. “That,” he says, “was the lightbulb moment.”

Away from the trio, McCreadie plays as part of STRATA, the band formed around another young Glasgow jazz luminary, drummer Graham Costello. Joining him in STRATA is Dumfries-born Liam Shortall, whose own band Corto.alto blend jazz and hip-hop. Nimbus Sextet, another young Scottish jazz band, recently signed to storied label Acid Jazz and McCreadie’s own label, Edition Records, is home to artist such as The Bad Plus, Denys Baptiste and fellow pianist Jason Rebello.

Is there something in the water in Glasgow at the moment to be causing this upsurge of jazz talent? There is something but it’s not in the water. It’s on Renfrew Street. McCreadie’s theory is that the Conservatoire is acting as a sort of incubator, which in turn boosts the writing of tunes, the creation of bands and the mounting of gigs at which those bands perform. In turn, that scene draws in musicians from beyond the Conservatoire, and the whole thing snowballs.

So far, so good. But although Glasgow is a UNESCO City of Music, it’s the rock, indie and dance scenes which tend to take the space – literally. On top of that, Glasgow’s dedicated jazz venue, the Blue Arrow, has just closed.

“We’re missing something,” he admits. “Imagine if Scotland had a Ronnie Scott’s or a Birdland or a Blue Note. The Jazz Bar [in Edinburgh] and the Blue Lamp [Aberdeen] are great, but I think Glasgow especially is really missing a regular club where you can regularly play, and more of a regular circuit. There’s a really good vibe around the scene, there’s incredible musicians, and great audiences. There’s all the ingredients – just not the pot to put them in.”

That said, Scotland’s future as a nursery for talented jazz musicians looks safe. And with Fergus McCreadie at its fore, it’s in very capable hands.

The Mercury Prize is on BBC Four on October 18 (9pm); the Jazz FM Awards are on October 20 and broadcast on the station (10pm); the SAY Award is also on October 20 (Albert Halls, Stirling); Forest Floor is out now (Edition Records)