Soundhouse Winter Festival, Edinburgh review: 'warm and welcoming'

Fergus MacCreadie | Douglas Robertson

“Starting up a new festival in these hard times was a bit risky, but it looks like it’s worked,” said Douglas Robertson, co-founder (with Jane-Ann Purdy) of Edinburgh’s Soundhouse live music organisation, as he introduced the first of Saturday night’s two concerts at the Traverse Theatre.

Robertson was addressing the venue’s smaller Traverse 2 stage, sold out to it’s capacity of around 125, and looking forward to the evening’s main event in Traverse 1, also sold out at double that number. Both concerts demonstrated how exceptionally good these spaces are for live music, with artists including Victoria Hume, Megan Black, Hannah Lavery, Su-a Lee and Callum Easter (the latter at the Queen’s Hall) performing between Thursday and Monday.

Saturday’s early evening show was an hour from Edinburgh-based jazz singer Nicole Smit’s Quintet. Her backing musicians were excellent, especially the fluid, edge-of-your-seat exciting playing of drummer and MD Vid Gobac, but all played a supporting role to Smit’s strikingly powerful and charismatic voice. She skipped between Dinah Washington’s version of I Could Write a Book, a bouncing but minimal rearrangement of One Note Samba and a breathless, rapid-fire finale of Bill Evans’ A Child is Born and Billie Holiday's Now or Never with ease. 

For the solo first part of Fergus McCreadie’s later set he played classics by Strayhorn and Thelonius Monk, alongside Jerry Herman’s It Only Takes a Minute from the soundtrack of Hello, Dolly!, in his own prodigiously dextrous and inventive style at the grand piano. For the second act he was joined by Lithuanian electric guitarist Mindaugas Stumbras and Italian double-bassist Michaelangelo Scanroglio and drummer Mattia Galeotti for a rare, dazzlingly fluid performance of one another’s music.

It’s not quite Celtic Connections yet, but Soundhouse have created a warm, welcoming, musically high-quality new festival. The experiment deserves to continue and to thrive.