Former Edinburgh drummer John Rae has been appointed musical director of the Aotearoa Jazz Orchestra, New Zealand’s national jazz ensemble.
Wellington-based Rae, who moved to New Zealand in 2008, has achieved some notable successes since settling in Oceania. In 2009 he became the first jazz musician to be appointed composer-in-residence at Victoria University in Wellington and his 2020 release Where the Wild Clematis Grow has gone on to become New Zealand’s best-selling jazz record. More recently Rae was invited to produce the second album by the Royal New Zealand Air Force Jazz Orchestra, Kaiwhakatere.
“New Zealand, like Scotland, has a strong jazz scene for quite a small country,” says Rae. “It’s always produced jazz musicians – there were a few prominent players from New Zealand on the London scene in the 1970s, for example – and there are good young musicians coming through all the time. I’m really proud to be working with the orchestra.”
One of the emerging players Rae mentions, guitarist Theo Thompson has just joined Rae and his long-time colleague, pianist Ben Wilcock, in recording a new album, March of the Octopus, which will be released in Europe on 28th November.
“It was great to add Theo to the sessions,” says Rae. “Ben and I have worked together a lot and the other two musicians on the album, bassist Patrick Bleakley and saxophonist Roger Manins, are real stalwarts of NZ jazz. Theo brought in a fresh sound that expanded the group’s tonal palette really effectively.”
Before moving to New Zealand Rae was the drummer with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra from 2000 to 2003. He also led the era-defining John Rae Collective in the late 1980s and the jazz-folk outfit Celtic Feet, which won a Herald Angel at the Fringe in 2005. Last year, his Big Feet, a thirty-seven-piece gathering of traditional musicians, a jazz big band and the Isle of Islay Pipe Band, released its much-delayed Live from Islay, a recording of its debut concert, staged in Port Ellen back in 2003.
“That concert was quite an event and it’s one that people would bring up in conversation when I came back to visit family in Scotland,” says Rae. “So it was good to finally make it available as an album.”
Rae has always maintained strong connections with Scotland. He enjoyed periodic reunions with pianist Brian Kellock, his friend of forty years who sadly died in May, and he was pleased to release Think About It, Kellock’s follow-up to his trio’s BBC Jazz Award-winning Live at Henry’s album, on the label Rae runs with Ben Wilcock, Thick Records NZ.
“I like keeping contact with Scotland through the record label as well as personally,” says Rae. “Even the new album has a Scottish connection, aside from myself, as it was mastered by another old friend, the guitarist Kevin Murray in his studio just outside Dundee.”
