Life on Tyneside clearly agrees with Graeme Wilson.

Since moving to Newcastle in 2005, the saxophonist and founder member of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, who returns to Scotland next week with Tyneside’s nationally acclaimed jazz combo ACV, has found his playing and composing talents in such demand that he has had to put plans to form his own band on ice.

“There’s a really good scene down here,” says Wilson, who for many years was a familiar figure around Glasgow and was once half of a busking duo that literally took jazz to the streets. “There are plenty of good musicians to play with, and what’s been great for me is that the people running the bands I work with are so open about including my material. I’m playing with bands of all different sizes and in a variety of styles, so that means that I have a ready-made outlet for whatever I write, whenever I write it. I’d like to form my own band one day but right now, I really don’t need to.”

The Crieff-born Wilson first came to the Scottish jazz audience’s attention when he appeared as a teenager in Highland Express, the band led by Graham Robb, previously the bassist with pioneering Scottish jazz-rock group Head.

Wilson was still at school at the time and had come to the saxophone through watching bands on television such as UB40 and Madness, whose saxophonists seemed primarily to be having a good time and looking cool. There were plenty of jazz records at home too, as his parents had lived in Glasgow during the trad jazz boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and had latched onto people like Chris Barber, through whom they also discovered blues players Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.

“They had Modern Jazz Quartet records, too, but it was the blues stuff that I probably got interested in first,” says Wilson. “I think they actually went to see Big Bill Broonzy when he came to Scotland. I certainly remember hearing his records around the house, and they took me to see a few people at The Gig, in Blairgowrie, which was probably the closest venue to us and had a great line-up for such a small town. I saw Jack Bruce there, which was amazing. But it was the pop guys who got me into playing and then I played in some pop bands later and discovered that it wasn’t as much fun as it looked because I couldn’t dance to save myself.”

With limited opportunities to play jazz around Crieff, the Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra’s summer course, run then, as now, by the tireless Richard Michael, came to Wilson’s rescue. Accepted into the orchestra itself, he spent a significant chunk of his teens on FYJO’s busy schedule of rehearsals and concerts, having his ambitions to play jazz for a living encouraged through attending FYJO workshops with Fife’s greatest jazz export, New York-based baritone saxophonist and veteran of the Ellington, Herman and Lincoln Center orchestras, Joe Temperley.

Moving to Glasgow to study architecture at Strathclyde University, Wilson quickly discovered this was a mistake and switched to the English faculty, but his heart really lay in music. He joined the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra, got regular gigs with pop bands and co-formed the Hung Drawn Quartet, a four saxophone line-up that took its cue from New York’s 29th Street Saxophone Quartet then forged ahead in its own style.

He also teamed up with fellow saxophonist Raymond MacDonald in the aforementioned busking duo and played Weather Report tunes to pedestrians on Sauchiehall Street, a more profitable pursuit than you might imagine as it financed a trip around Europe for the pair. With saxophone teaching work in a diary that also included early involvement with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, of which he’s still a member, and recordings with the saxophone quartet Rich in Knuckles, there was plenty to keep him in Glasgow until his partner was offered the chance to study in Newcastle.

“It was quite a step, moving at the time,” he says. “But I’d been down to Newcastle and Gateshead and seen what was going on, and it didn’t take too long to find people to play with. I’d known the singer Ruth Lambert when she was in Glasgow. She’s doing really well down here now and it was good to team up with her because she’s a great singer and I love complementing her voice. Other things fell into place after that.”

Among those things was the chance to work with the brilliant composer John Warren, who is perhaps best known for his collaborations with English saxophonist John Surman and who, as well as running his eight-piece Splinter Group, directs the area’s much lauded Voice of the North Jazz Orchestra, which has performed Wilson’s larger-scale compositions with Wilson himself as featured soloist.

“Just being able to go to John with some charts and have him show you where you’re going wrong – or confirm that you’re going right – is fantastic,” says Wilson. “Because he’s such an amazing composer and arranger himself, he can spot instantly where something might be improved and show you how to improve it.”

On another tack entirely, Wilson has also been welcomed into Tyneside’s fairly active free improvisation fold and found the experience of performing with internationally regarded players including saxophonist John Tchicai and pianists Marilyn Crispell and Aki Takase on the local On The Outside festival both scary and hugely rewarding. Having friend and band mate, bassist Andy Champion, who leads ACV – the Andy Champion Five – along on those On The Outside gigs was a bonus.

“Andy’s a monster player and ACV’s moved a long way in a relatively short time, partly, I think, because he’s so receptive to other members of the band’s ideas,” says Wilson.

“There’s a great spirit in the band. We regularly play in other bands together – for instance, I play and write for keyboards player Paul Edis’s own band – and our drummer, Adrian Tilbrook, is an incredibly experienced player who played in the legendary jazz-blues band Back Door in the 1970s. We’ve been working on a lot of new material for this tour we’re on at the moment, some rock influenced, some more straight-ahead jazz, some more free, and it’s sounding good, so I’m looking forward to getting back up to Scotland to play it.”

ACV plays the Jazz Bar, Edinburgh, on Wednesday, November 16.