Forty-one members and counting! Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band, the gigantic Leeds jazz group embracing ‘chaos, imperfection and all that’
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- Ferg's Imaginary Big Band has 41 musicians playing on their second album The New Atomic, though gigs typically feature about 30; saxophonist Bess Shooter says an early pared-down performance never needs repeating
- Bassist Fergus Quill, the band's main composer and leader, formed FIBB out of a 2018 Sun Ra project at Leeds College of Music; the group has since played Ronnie Scott's and the Love Supreme festival
- FIBB tours the UK using a convoy of nine-seater minibuses plus one "wally car" for latecomers, with Quill noting that nobody in the band makes any money from it
- The band sits in a lineage of Loose Tubes, Sun Ra and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra — queer-friendly, anti-fascist and sprawling — rather than the refined mainstream big band tradition
- Leeds is essential to FIBB's existence, with Quill saying it "has to happen in a place where the rent is under £500 a month" and rehearsals costing under £30 at spaces like Eiger Studios and the Attic
- Quill, who described himself as a "neurodiverse kid with additional educational needs," was accepted to Leeds College of Music after reciting the chords to Horace Silver's Song for My Father down the phone without an audition
- FIBB's ethos is "chaos, imperfection and all that," with Quill requiring only that members have "an independent musical voice" rather than being the strongest sight-reader
Why it matters: FIBB demonstrates that a 41-piece jazz ensemble can operate entirely unpaid in a UK city only because Leeds rents stay under £500/month and rehearsal rooms cost under £30 — meaning the project's survival is contingent on local housing economics as much as on musical talent, a model that would collapse in higher-rent cities.
