The first Soundhouse Winter Festival which was part of Edinburgh’s Fair Saturday events around St Andrew’s Day has been declared a success after the numbers have been crunched.
The festival of jazz, indy and folk music ran from 28 November to 2 December and attracted a mainly local audience with almost three quarters coming from Edinburgh.
The festival included sell-out performances by the Nicole Smit Quintet, Fergus McCreadie with an outstanding performance from guest Italian star Mattia Galeotti on drums and Su-a Lee performing alongside a stellar line-up of trad favourites – Duncan Chisholm, Donald Shaw and Hamish Napier.
Other popular highlights included a screening of The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933), opened by Shetland pianist Amy Laurenson, and accompanied by music composed by award winning multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson from Fair Isle with Shetlander Catriona Macdonald; a preview of rock goddess Megan Black’s new album; and a performance of Unwritten Women read by Edinburgh’s former Makar Hannah Lavery to a new score written and performed by Kate Young.
Jane Ann Purdy and Douglas Robertson, producers of the Soundhouse Winter Festival, said: “We are thrilled with the appetite that audiences have shown for live music during the winter months. We knew that people would come out for the festival if we programmed great music, so that’s what we did and it paid off. It’s been an absolute blast to present five days of jazz, rock, punk, poetry, and silent film, not a line-up we have had the opportunity to programme before, but one that we would definitely look to repeat next year.”
The Soundhouse Organisation returns in May with more live music at the Traverse for Edinburgh’s Tradfest (2-12 May 2025). Dates for the Soundhouse Winter Festival 2025 are to be confirmed.
Support for the festival came from The National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
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