Folk, Jazz etc: 'We're trying to break from the idea we're just an old banjo band with old tunes'

LISTEN to the Nova Scotia Jazz Band cutting a rug in King Oliver's Doctor Jazz, from their new album, If I Had You, with its irrepressibly stylish interpretations of classic Dixieland jazz, and it doesn't particularly sound like a band still seeking a sound, which is how its clarinettist and saxophonist John Burgess sees it.

"We're trying to find our voice, thinking five years down the line," says Burgess, who can himself be regarded as a man of many voices, whose reeds can be heard sounding out Latin jazz, free-improv or post-bop, but for whom the Nova Scotia project is not just another fun trad band, but a very serious project indeed.

It's also one which, going by the Nova Scotia's gig list for the coming year, is finding favour at home and abroad, including as it does the Tarragona Dixieland festival in Spain, Glastonbury festival, and a string of bookings throughout the UK. If I Had You, released at the beginning of next month on C-Side records, is the band's third album since they formed two years ago, and according to Burgess, they're really finding an audience, continuing a devotion to classic jazz in the tradition of other eminent Scots players such as Sandy Brown, Alex Welsh and Archie Semple.

Burgess reckons there has been a resurgence of interest "maybe not in trad jazz but more in the ragtime roots element. I think people are still suspicious of the trad side of it," he adds, referring to the huge trad jazz boom of the early 1960s - which, at 43, he can't remember himself: "I was told there were 400 full bands for those two years up and down the country, and I think that brief two years hammered any band with a banjo in it."

Burgess's clarinet and sax bubble and simmer their way through the Nova Scotia's music, shooting it out with the rich toned cornet of Mike Daly, the skittering banjo of Duncan Findlay and Ken MacDonald's limber double bass. It's a markedly different sound from the gently ruminative album he released last year in duet with pianist Liam Noble, under the delightful title of Eggs with Cherry at the Zen Cafe (also on C-Side), which he describes as a tribute to his favourite clarinettist, the late, Edinburgh-born Archie Semple, and which includes an unlikely sounding but wistful cover of Neil Young's After the Goldrush.

Does switching between such disparate styles involve a change of mindset? "No," replies Burgess, who has lately been considering these very questions of identity as a player. He recently discussed them with Lol Coxhill, the ubiquitous English sax player who, over the decades, has cropped up in such bewilderingly disparate company as Bobby Wellins, Stan Tracey, the Albion Band and the Damned."He said he thought the fact that I played in a huge variety of music was a good thing - because at the time I was getting some criticism for this - was I a Dixieland player, a free jazz player or a rock player? And, of course, Lol's done all that."

His own workload later in the year includes playing with Coxhill and with the Glasgow Improvisers' Orchestra (GIO), but the Nova Scotias are the main thing. Already they're planning their next album which will consist of original material "in the classic jazz style la Sandy Brown", as Burgess puts it.

"We're trying to break away from the idea that we're just a dusty old banjo band playing old tunes. We want to stay within the genre, but different melodies, different feel."

• The Nova Scotia Jazz Band plays the Tall Ship, Glasgow, on 26 February and Whighams Jazz Club, Edinburgh, on 6 March. See novascotiajazzband.co.uk