We sat down with Fergus McCreadie ahead of him (and corto.alto) joining the stellar cast of musician-composers on tour with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra for Nu-Age Sounds ll – Planet World with gigs in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow from 31st January to 2nd February.
Tickets here
Edinburgh (31st Jan) – https://www.usherhall.co.uk/book/67601
Dundee (1st Feb) – https://dundeerep.co.uk/book/instance/346203
Glasgow (2nd Feb) –https://tickets.glasgowlife.org.uk/overview/33942
As a Mercury Prize nominee and the first jazz musician to win the Scottish Album of the Year Award, how has your journey shaped your approach to composing for an ambitious project like Planet World?
I think that creating music is always an amalgamation of what you’ve absorbed up to the point of composition, both musically and generally. The awards are of course nice things to have but the real journey has always been the one taking place in the practice room. I think my deepening interest in classical music the past few years has shaped a lot of what I wanted to achieve in the composition for this project – both in using the instruments as colours as they’re used in a symphony, and studying Bach to really understand how multiple intersecting lines can create a rich harmonic tapestry.
With your impressive accolades, including the Jazz FM Instrumentalist of the Year and multiple Best Album awards, what unique elements are you bringing to convey the character of your assigned planet and its inhabitants in Planet World?
My brief was to write a piece of music for Mars – a tricky task given that a very famous piece of music for it already exists! I was interested by the idea that Mars is the most likely planet that humans could actually live on in the future (Venus would be the next if you could terraform it) and I think that if you were among the first people to live on mars it would start out as quite a bleak experience but eventually society and art would develop to make it feel like it could be a home. For that journey I used different sections with contrasting harmonic movement – the first section is over one bass note, sounding quite static, whereas the second has many moving chords. I also used some unusual instruments in the big band setting – flutes and clarinets – to create hopefully a slightly “alien” sound in the otherwise brass heavy world of the project.
The narrative of Planet World calls for a blend of orchestral jazz and science fiction themes. How do you balance the spontaneity of jazz with the structured storytelling required for this project?
I really like when solos are well integrated into the storytelling of composition. Many jazz tunes exist simply as vehicles for improvisation, and I really like this too, but for this project I tried to write in solo sections that contributed to the arc of the piece as a whole, rather than just existing for the sake of improvising.
Having worked with the SNJO and other acclaimed musicians, how does collaborating with this stellar cast of composers and the orchestra influence your creative process and performance?
I think the main thing is knowing that you have the freedom to write exactly what’s in your head without making any concessions to the skill of the musicians in the group. The SNJO is such a great band and not only are all the musicians incredible improvisers, they also really do their homework and know the piece before the rehearsal has actually started. Knowing that everything you put on the music stand is going to be elevated in this way is a very inspiring thing.
The Nu-Age Sounds II – Planet World tour combines music with a visually stunning sound and light spectacle. How do you envision your compositions enhancing the audience’s experience of this multimedia performance?
I haven’t seen any of the media so I’m not sure! But presumably it’s going to turn it into a thematically stronger experience – people’s imagination can be served by what’s seen in front of them, and hopefully what I’ve written is Mars-like enough that people can feel transported in the room.