Drumming up interest in Scots jazz

A LEADING musician in Scotland, John Rae developed his love for music from an early age. And jazz was the dominant sound.

It can be easily explained why John became one of the most accomplished jazz drummers Scotland ever seen and heard, as it all started with his dad.

Ronnie Rae, John’s father and an accomplished bass player, encouraged – indeed, required - his children to indulge in musical activities. That may help explain why five siblings are either musicians or singers and the sixth is at least thinking about it.

John, 38, performs regularly with his father and three sisters - Cathie, Gina and Sylvia - in their Rae Sisters band.

"I grew up with jazz at home," John explains, "but my best pal when I was about 15 was a pipe band drummer, and we used to practise the pipe band drum patterns a lot."

Born and based in Edinburgh, John is a member of the jazz generation that includes Tommy Smith, Brian Kellock, Colin Steele, the Bancroft twins, Kevin MacKenzie and several other movers and shakers on the Scottish jazz scene.

John has firmly established himself as Scotland’s premier jazz drummer since the formation of the seminal John Rae Collective in the late 1980s. At the same time, he has a long-standing love for Scottish music that has been reflected in a succession of projects, again going back to the late 1980s and the jazz-meets-folk fusions of the eclectic big band Giant Stepping Stanes.

The current focus of his cross-genre experiments lies in Celtic Feet, the band he has led since 1999. The band has issued two CDs on the Caber label, the most recent being Beware The Feet in 2001.

Celtic Feet is a jazz quartet plus two folk musicians, and John’s music for the group has broken new ground in merging the diverse elements of his musical sensibility, not to mention wearing "dodgy" kilts in a jazz context. Their audience is primarily a jazz-oriented one, but they have also won support among more adventurous folk fans.

"In Celtic Feet, traditional music is a great source for melody and repetition of the form, and then we add all the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of jazz," says John. "I’ve always been interested in trying to find ways to bring my love for jazz and Scottish music together, although it would be easier just to have two bands!"

Celtic Feet have branched out in even more diverse directions in three recent projects. The first saw them transform into a jazz big band under the name Big Feet at the Islay Jazz Festival in 2003, with the Islay Pipe Band thrown in for good measure. The project was a stunning success at the festival, and they reprised their efforts in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

"I always thought it be great to have 40 of us instead of six in Celtic Feet," John says. "I had a whole set of plans in mind before I went to Islay, but to be honest I just started writing and the thing took on a life of its own.

"Some of the material involved arranging Scottish traditional tunes and others were completely new," he says.

John then wrote music for another project with a very Scottish theme, Dancebase’s production Off-Kilter, which toured in early 2004. John performed his music for the show with a slimmed-down version of the band, and relished the chance to work in a new genre and with some classic Scottish music.

"My brief for the show was to look at old copies of television shows like The White Heather Club and Thingummyjig, and videos of Jimmy Shand," says John.

"I jokingly called it a reconciliation process – we had to go back and look at the reality of what that image of Scotland actually was, and then try and interpret it without just taking the mickey. That would have been the easy way to go, but there was a lot of good stuff in there with the kitsch, and we tried to tease that out."

More recently, John toured with Celtic Feet and two musicians from Hungary under yet another variation on the name, Magic Feet. The project brought together Celtic Feet’s characteristic fusion with the gypsy-jazz traditions of eastern Europe.

Despite all these digressions, Celtic Feet itself remains central to his work. The band – his other family - features Brian Kellock on piano, Phil Bancroft or Julian Arguelles on saxophone, Mario Caribe on bass, Eilidh Shaw on fiddle, and recent recruit Martin Green on accordion, replacing Simon Thoumire’s concertina.

"That was down to the instrument," John notes. "Simon is an excellent player, but I came to feel that the concertina was a little bit too light for what I wanted, and I needed the bigger sound that Martin gets from his accordion."

The bigger the better for John Rae and his fans.