Fergus McCreadie Trio

Pianist Fergus McCreadie is one of Scotland’s most exciting young talents. Born in Jamestown, near Strathpeffer, he grew up in Dollar in Clackmannanshire and graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2018.

As well as winning the prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Award with his trio in 2016, he has twice won the Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the year under-17s Prize and is the winner of the Guy Jones Prize, the Joe Temperley Prize from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the Linda Trahan Memorial Prize from St Andrews University.

His trio has featured at the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife, Aberdeen and Islay jazz festivals regularly and has toured in Norway, Sweden, Lithuania and Estonia. The group has also appeared at Oslo and Stockholm jazz festivals and in its own headlining show at the Ronnie Scott’s International Piano Trio Festival.

Self-released in Spring 2018, the trio’s debut album, Turas, has been praised for “reflecting his engagement with the Scottish landscape and musical traditions while also showing a firm grasp of the jazz piano tradition” (Jazz in Europe). Turas won Album of the Year at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards 2019 and Best Album at the Scottish Jazz Awards 2019, following on from McCreadie’s Best Instrumentalist title at the 2018 awards. McCreadie also won Best Instrumentalist at the Scottish Jazz Awards in 2020.

To emphasise the wide appeal of McCreadie’s music, Turas was also shortlisted for the cross-genre Scottish Album of the Year Award in 2019, reaching the final ten from 290-plus candidates, a rare feat for a jazz album.

Released on the prestigious Edition Records, its successor, Cairn, has been received with even more widespread enthusiasm, earning five stars from music magazine Mojo and the leading Dutch music website Written in Music and four stars from Jazzwise and The Times. It was also chosen as Jazz FM’s Album of the Week and cited by industry observers as one of the most significant jazz releases before it was released.

McCreadie, who also works with drummer Graham Costello’s STRATA, Glasgow collective corto.alto and BBC Young Jazz Musician 2020 finalist Matt Carmichael, formed his trio with bassist David Bowden and drummer Stephen Henderson in 2016. Both are acclaimed musicians, band leaders and in-demand players. Bowden won the Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year title in 2017 and leads the world music-influenced band Mezcla, which released its debut album, Shoot the Moon on Ubuntu Records in February 2020 and Henderson, a Jazzwise magazine One to Watch in 2018, formed his Modern Vikings group in 2019.