Emerging from Fergus McCreadie's sonic storm of Scottish jazz

On Saturday your correspondent took his seat for one of the highlights of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival (EJBF), a sell-out appearance by the Fergus McCreadie Octet at the carnivalesque Palais du Variété Spiegeltent in George Square.

By the end he was on his feet along with the rest of the crowd as a deserved standing ovation greeted what had been a barnstorming performance by the Mercury Music Prize-nominated jazz pianist.

McCreadie’s normal trio features fellow Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduates David Bowden and Stephen Henderson, on bass and drums respectively. But for this specially composed full-length piece, designed to favour extensive improvisation, they were joined by saxophonists Harry Weir, Matt Carmichael and Paul Towndrow, trumpet player Sandy Watkins and a second drummer, shaven-headed Glasgow jazz dynamo Graham Costello.

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Watkins had stepped in at short notice for another Mercury nominee – Laura Jurd, down with food poisoning – and had had only a couple of hours to prepare. You couldn’t tell from his playing. Like his fellow musicians he was magnificent on the night as the ever-flowing music shifted from whispered, folk-inflected melodies to full-throated jazz blowouts. The frantic and cacophonous section featuring just McCreadie and the two drummers was a sonic storm you never wanted to come out the other side of. But emerge we did.

On Monday night, something more intimate – an EJBF event presented in collaboration with Edinburgh promoters Soundhouse, heroic supporters of grass-roots jazz and traditional music in the capital. The venue was the bar of the Traverse Theatre and on the raised corner of it which serves as a stage were Skylla, the four-piece band led by Italian-born bassist Ruth Goller.

Skylla is the jazz project of Italian-born bassist Ruth Goller (Image: Newsquest)
She has performed and collaborated with everyone from Damon Albarn to Sons Of Kemet but here she was joined a drummer and vocalists Alice Grant and Lauren Kinsella. Imagine innovative Northumbrian folk singer sisters Becky and Rachel Unthank jamming with thunderous Canadian art-noise legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Support act Simone Seales also deserves a mention. Describing themselves as an “intersectional cellist”, they straddle the worlds of jazz, classical, improvisation and (whisper it) the avant-garde. Yes, we still have some of that rare stuff in Scotland.

Introducing Skylla and providing a warm introduction to Seales’s performance was a now recovered Laura Jurd, who has curated the EJBF’s From Folk To Freedom strand in which this show was included.

The EJBF continues this week and still to come are appearances by Soweto Kinch, Grammy-winning saxophonist Tim Garland, trumpet player Byron Wallen and the London Afrobeat Collective to name just four. Happily, one of the venues in operation for the festival is The Jazz Bar, which was thought lost following its closure in April but which has since been saved and re-opened. You can read more about that here.

Hoping for a great leap forward

Glasgow City Council has approved a six year cultural strategy aimed at shaping and (here’s the important bit) supporting the city’s arts sector between now and 2030.

Produced in collaboration with arts charity Glasgow Life and Glasgow’s Culture Forum, it was launched last week and as well as requesting input from interested parties, it lays out broad areas for development. They are: celebrating and promoting Glasgow’s cultural heritage both past and present, increasing cultural participation, and boosting and supporting the creative economy. Because (quite rightly) nothing happens at strategic level without a thought for the environmental consequences, all of the above need to be undertaken in as sustainable a way as possible. That’s point number four.

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All this matters because Scotland’s largest city is home to 41% of the country’s actors, dancers and broadcasters, 38% of its musicians, and 29% of its artists and graphic designers. It also hosts national companies such as Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet and the National Theatre of Scotland. That’s a lot of cultural oomph clustered in one place.

Strategy to support future of Glasgow’s cultural sector has been approved (Image: Brian Hartley)
It also matters because those same companies, practitioners, creatives and arts professionals have not had an easy time of it over the last half decade as a result of funding cuts and the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s a point which isn’t lost on the Culture Forum members in particular. “Recent years have been extremely tough, and so many of the city’s artists and artists organisations are now in a very precarious position,” says Anita Clark, director of Tramway-based organisation The Work Room which supports dancers and choreographers.

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“It is extremely welcome that, at this challenging time, Glasgow City Council has taken the courageous step of endorsing a new cultural strategy for the city, embedding culture at the heart of Glasgow’s future plans and ambitions. The strategy is a starting point to galvanise deep commitment and collaborative working with artists and independent creative organisations.”

An action plan for years one and two has already been drawn up. Hopefully the benefits will soon be visible.

Attention earthlings

“I started when I was 10, I’m now turning 20,” says Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown. “Feels very weird.”

She was talking in a behind-the-scenes video released by Netflix as a teaser for season five of the game-changing science-fiction series. The clip gives a sneak peek at the sets and news on cast additions. We also learned from Netflix that production has reached the half way stage and will wrap by Christmas, and that the completed series should air some time next year. It will consist of eight episodes, each one “very long” according to Brown’s co-star, Maya Hawke.

Maya Hawke and Joe Keery on the Stranger Things set (Image: Netflix)
These sorts of announcements set the internet ablaze – or that part of it colonised by sci-fi geeks – and are often a fixture of so-called sci-fi conventions, the real world events at which fans gather to meet, swap stuff, dress up as their favourite character and attend signings and panel discussions. These events proliferate across the US, the UK and beyond, but the grand-daddy of them all is the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon.

First held in 1939, it is peripatetic and has only twice settled down in Scotland, both times in Glasgow. But guess what? It’s returning in August, its first UK visit for a decade. As well as announcing the winner of the prestigious Hugo Award – the Booker Prize for sci-fi – it will feature appearances by writers from across the globe (and the M8: Edinburgh sci-fi luminary Ken McLeod is scheduled to appear). And who knows, maybe there will be more Stranger Things news to announce. You can read more about Worldcon here.