Don’t call this fusion, the sound of Fergus McCreadie proves folk and jazz are entirely the same thing, and always have been.

Release Date: 24th October 2025

Label: Edition Records

Format: CD / Vinyl / Digital

VIVID AND VIBRANT

It is inevitable we would eventually get round to Fergus McCreadie for a review, given the company he keeps. Which isn’t to say there isn’t familiarity with his earlier works; this is his 4th release solo release, but sometimes jazz has seemed a step too far, at least for this writer. Silly, I know, as there so much jazz seeping across into the Scottish folk scene, currently so vivid and vibrant.

Take, for instance, Skreel, which we reviewed at the top end of ’24, and which, alongside Innes White, Charlie Stewart and Megan Macdonald, each of whose more folk oriented releases and/or collaborations tend routinely to get a mention, also featured (features?) McCreadie and Matt Carmichael. Both are doyens of Glasgow jazz, and often play in each other’s projects. None of Carmichael’s tenor sax this time, though, just the meritricious piano play of McCreadie, which has him teaming him up with two of his usual culprits, David Bowden and Stephen Henderson, on double bass and drums respectively. (Indeed, and who, with McCreadie, made up the Fergus McCreadie Trio that preceded his solo billing.)

TUNES FLY SIDEWAYS

Most commentators enjoy the way in which McCreadie can suck folk and traditional themes into his compositions. Melody is always at the front of his queue, ahead of overcompensating tunelessness with technique. Which isn’t to say he can’t take a tune and make it fly sideways, finding enough nuance in and between the notes, to keep both expert and occasional fully engaged. It tends to be the geography of his homeland that inspires him.

Earlier album titles have all addressed various aspects thereof, from Cairn, his solo debut, onward, and this is no different. Shielings are the summer dwellings that cattle rearing Highlanders would keep, up in the hills, to take advantage the verdant pastures of the short Scottish summer. Ruins of these are scattered across the North of Scotland’s wilder environs.

A SPIRITUAL FOCUS

It is with an unexpected prolonged drone chord that the set begins, possibly on an accordion. Sidefooted, the faltering piano notes that McCreadie then draws forth carry a somehow more spiritual focus. His right hand meanders for a few moments, ahead his left bringing in the structure of a delicate reel. Bowden makes some exploratory noises and then, with the steady tap of Henderson’s rim, the dance begins, Wayfinder clearly being one. As the theme dips in and out, accompanied by varied improvisational play, it all hangs together tremendously. A section of a single repeating note is terrific, ahead ripples cascading up and down the keyboard. A momentous start.

Sparrowsong captures again McCreadie’s play at his most lyrical. I can’t say if this truly is birdsong, but he trills as if it should be, before finding a more complex pattern, competing rhythms flashing between the three players. In the space of two short tracks, he demonstrates the ease with which he can merge genres, having the folkers admire the jazz, and the the jazzers the folk. Jazz piano can sometimes be icy, this is warm. The more reflective Lily Bay follows, a repeating pattern, evocative of the deserted beach it no doubt represents. Some gorgeous flickers of bass punctuate only sporadically, before it ends, suddenly, on a distant cymbal.

OR IS IT CHOPPILY SMOOTH?

Some backstory, before you go hunting where Lily Bay may be. Rather than the carefully prepared studio setting that nurtured previous recordings, The Shieling came about much more on a wing and a prayer. Working on a whim to make the album on the terroir that defines it, McCreadie and chums took off to the Outer Hebrides, to the island of North Uist, and to a tiny cottage, owned by relatives.

No small undertaking, this required the transporting of the piano used, all the way up from Essex, and over the Minch to the island, uncertain even if it would fit. It did, with inches to spare and an hour of trying. Armed with a few barely sketched out ideas, the trio, abetted by a sound engineer and a trusty piano tuner, set to work, joined, a day or two later, by Laura Jurd, in charge of producing the otherwise previously self-producing musician. One very long day of maybe 100 takes belies the final smoothly choppy outcome, contradictory adjectives intended.

Climb Through Pinewood suggests exactly that, with Henderson affecting a near military beat, as McCreadie makes the traditional sounding air into a march, slip notes scattering through, like boots sliding on possibly rocky terrain. A bass solo picks up sufficient vestiges of the melody to give a mid section a sense of the view, as the walker pauses for breath. Slower, and with exquisitely spare percussion, Fairfield also digs deep into the tradition, and could be an ancient Gaelic tune, more familiar on pipes or fiddle. The piano imparts a looseness that soon twists and turns on itself, as the the trio spark off each other into a dream like sequence, always keeping the main theme in, just about, sight.

A SENSE OF CONTROLLED CHAOS

Drums then beckon in possibly the highlight of the show, The Path Forks. Taking a little time to find a direction, the rhythm is sufficiently insistent to keep attention, even as you wonder quite where it is going. A couple of false alarms, and it becomes suddenly alive, with repeated right hand notes and a rolling pair of notes on the left. With a wondrous sense of controlled chaos, it is so uplifting as to need a second listen. The calming end sequence suggests the destination, once in doubt, became suddenly and finally clear. Anyone who thinks McCreadie a purveyor of jazz lite, for non-afficianados, should think again.

Instrumental music titles may just appear random, but McCreadie always reveals otherwise, as Windshelter conjures up al the sounds of a windchime, suggesting the bluster outside, as shelter is taken. A descending motif of the lower notes allows the alternate hand to breeze all over the upper keys. The concept repeats a couple, maybe three times, a little different on each iteration, the breeze becoming a bluster. I always try and avoid referencing Bruce Hornsby, my favourite pianist, into these reviews, but it is tricky not to, when McCreadie has that similar Keith Jarret meets Leon Russell touch.

KEITH MOON IN A PIPE BAND

Drums are the entry to Eagle Hunt, off kilter collisons that mimic, possibly, the sound of an eagles’s nest in construction, the interleaving of sometimes large branches with each other. OK, I’m imagining, but with the track so entitled, I think it fair game. A military bearing creeps also into this one, a marching band in Sauchiehall Street, as Henderson becomes the equivalent of Keith Moon in a pipe band. As if prompted, Ptarmigan takes only a little imagination to change the sound from piano to bagpipes, a tune which might well work with that mighty instrument. With The Path Forks, this is undoubtedly the other highlight, especially as it leaps into jig speed. Truly, with McCreadie, Dave Milligan and John Lowrie, Scotland is blessed in her pianists with jazz hands.

EMOTION AND SOUL

That accordion drone returns for The Orange Skyline, the final tune, showing an appreciation of the importance of bookending, having a start point as well as a finish, irrespective the flavours between. A haunting melody, again the potential for it to be picked up by alternate instrumentation is writ large. Someone like Duncan Chisholm, maybe, whose fiddle I can easily factor in to this air. It is a masterful closure to an album that so mustn’t be rid to the silo of jazz, so broad is the appeal. The sound, by Jurd, is spot on, drawing out out all the emotion and, yes, soul, poured into this lovely record.

(Jurd I had not heard of before, an English trumpet player from Hampshire, returning to playing and producung after raising her family. She too has a knack of transposing the different idioms of folk and jazz, with her latest album, Rites & Revelations, showing off collaborations with Irish fiddle-meister, Ultan O’Brien and Lau-man, Martin Green. Put it this way, it is her bandcamp page I am going next.)

Here is a terrific film of the trio playing Sparrowsong, live to the camera, on Uist:

Fergus McCreadie online : Website / Facebook / X / Instagram

Keep up with At The Barrier: Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram / Spotify / YouTube