It's like he never left.

As we approach the 30th anniversary of Peter Erskine stepping down from the Weather Report drum riser for the last time, his loyalty to one of the most inspirational bands in the history of jazz remains as strong as ever.

Some 500 albums have featured Erskine's remarkable versatility since 1982 – from the Grammy- winning high-energy sessions that produced the WDR Orchestra's Some Skunk Funk tribute to the Brecker Brothers to the more sedate orchestrations of Joni Mitchell's standards album, Both Sides Now. He's worked with acoustic fusion pioneers Steps Ahead, in his own Bill Evans-style trio with English pianist John Taylor and even shared the percussion platform with Evelyn Glennie at the Proms as well as powering the re-formed, precision-tooled Steely Dan on tour. Get Erskine talking about his five years with Weather Report, however, and it won't be a short conversation.

"It was a special time for me personally," he says down the line from sunny California as he prepares to fly out to guest in the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's upcoming celebration of Weather Report's music. "But it was a special time to be involved in music generally. You know, I'd walk into CBS studios on 57th Street and feel the history. You'd see this piece of equipment and know that Miles Davis had recorded one of his classic albums on it or Thelonious Monk had played the piano, and you'd think, I'd better shape up and produce my best. I still feel that when I walk on to the soundstage at Warner Bros. or some place like that but while this great democratisation that has allowed us all to make recordings much more easily is great in some ways, you don't feel quite the same sense of expectation when you walk into some guy's home studio that he's made out of his second bedroom."

Erskine's invitation to sit in the hot seat that was the Weather Report drum stool – many top players had been called and not measured up to the demands over the years – came thanks to the band's star bass guitarist of the time, Jaco Pastorius. The band had just finished recording what would become one of its biggest-selling albums, Heavy Weather, when Erskine fetched up in Pastorius' hometown, Miami, with the Maynard Ferguson band.

"One of our trumpet players, Ron Tooley, had played on Jaco's first solo album and he called Jaco up, expecting to get his answering machine, to ask him if he fancied coming to the gig," says Erskine. "Jaco was actually at home and said he'd seen Maynard's band last time and was going to pass until Ron said he might like to hear the band's new drummer.

"So Jaco came to the gig, we hung out a bit and at the end of the night he said, I'm going to be calling you. I thought, yeah, right, but apparently the drummer on Heavy Weather, Alex Acuna, was about to leave Weather Report."

When Pastorius proved as good as his word, Erskine was on tour with Ferguson and couldn't make the first day of recording for Heavy Weather's follow-up, Mr Gone. He thought he might have missed his chance to join his dream band. But Pastorius persisted and on the eve of a Japanese tour, Erskine was co-opted without the band's founders and co-leaders, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter having heard him play on a gig.

"We did this press conference before the first gig and a journalist asked me how playing with the Stan Kenton Orchestra and Maynard Ferguson's big band qualified me to play with Weather Report," says Erskine. "And before I could answer, Joe took the mic and said, Weather Report is a big band – and we're a small group too. And that's the way they looked at it, especially as Joe got more and more into the polyphonic synthesiser thing. He was arranging the keyboards as if they were horn sections, in a way, and adding these textures behind's Wayne's saxophone that was very orchestral.

"I actually felt that Joe and Wayne took me on trust because I'd played with Kenton and Maynard – they'd both played with Maynard too – and the reckoned that if I could handle the rigours of big band life and touring for 50 weeks of the year, as I did with Kenton, I would be able to handle the Weather Report gig."

Although it produced five successful albums, including the Grammy-winning 8.30, and hundreds of high-inducing gigs, Erskine's tenure with the band wasn't without its challenges. Pastorius, who would later descend into a hell of drugs, manic depression and an early death at the hands of an overzealous bouncer, was both an ultra-creative blessing and a one-man awkward squad, and after a honeymoon period with Zawinul, the gig post-mortems and daily drum lessons became hard to take. Erskine could have been lounging on a beach with his girlfriend and saved himself the grief but he realised that, quite simply, Shorter and Zawinul knew more about what they were doing than he did. So he stuck it out and doesn't regret a minute of his experience.

"I loved my time in the band and I think one of the reasons why the whole Scottish National Jazz Orchestra plays Weather Report project is so great is that it's celebrating really special music," he says. "It's not just chucking a few tunes together and bringing me over because I happen to be available. Tommy [Smith, SNJO's director] and I have gone over the repertoire and agreed on who should arrange what number and we're including, I think, the best percussionist in Europe, Marcio Doctor. It's music that was conceived by a quartet – or at least it was during most of my time in the band – but lends itself naturally to the big band setting, and I'm really excited about playing it."

As to what his former colleagues, only one of whom, Shorter, is still around, would have made of the SNJO project, Erskine thinks they would have approved also. "Jaco loved big band music, as witness his Word of Mouth Orchestra, and Joe was a huge Duke Ellington fan, which is where I think a lot of his orchestration ideas came from," he says. "I've been thinking about them a lot recently and they both gave me some great advice. Jaco's was: don't think so much, just concentrate, by which he meant if you listen to what's happening around you, you'll fit in better, and Joe's philosophy was that you should always compose when you play. I don't see Wayne that often but the last time we met, he was about to play a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and after I looked into his dressing room, he called me back and said "big bands". Wayne was always kind of enigmatic but in his own way, I like to think that he was giving these concerts his blessing."

Peter Erskine and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra celebrate the music of Weather Report at Caird Hall, Dundee on Thursday, February 23; Queen's Hall, Edinburgh on Friday, February 24; Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow on Saturday, February 25; and MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling on Sunday, February 26.