Did you catch Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band at the 2023 Lancaster Jazz Festival? If so, you were lucky as the tickets sold out pretty quick! With a 30-odd strong band of amazing musicians, this was the biggest show we’ve ever put on, and it was such a special night.

Now you can re-live the magic, or experience it if you wern’t able to get tickets, with a brilliant live recording coming soon on 13 December 2024. The perfect soundtrack to a cosmic Christmas.

Pre-order now: Live at Lancaster Jazz Festival by Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band

Live at Lancaster Jazz Festival by Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band is now available for pre-order from Bandcamp. Get one track now, and the rest when it’s released.

From the album notes:

Fergus Quill, styled in a tattered flamingo-pink suit, faces the crowd. Behind him a menagerie of musicians chirp, cackle, bleat, stomp, cry, sing, crash. The 16-piece horn section cloaks Fergus in cacophony as Hamish ‘Sonic’ Dixon’s siren wails over the band from his briefcase of mysterious gear. Bess Shooter on bari and Will Lakin on guitar cleave through the racket with just two notes, lighting a fire beneath the percussion section headed by Theo Goss and Josh Ketch at the drum sets. Fergus slowly raises his arms like a great bird, uniting the horn section to form a menacing melody. As the electricity in the room reaches breaking point, Fergus cuts off the band with a flurry to replace the tumult with a single sonorous chord. Thus closing the opening number: ‘Gutterball’. For Fergus and the band, this gig felt like a turning point in our live performance style. The show spirals through chaos and noise when suddenly a finger points to someone to take a solo, moving the music to settle on a quiet improvised theme of love. It’s hard to put down the feeling of a Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band show or to capture the spontaneity and risk in every moment of the set, but this LP represents a little slice of this particular moment in the band’s journey.