Yates then chose to spend a year living in a small caravan travelling round the folk music festivals of Britain and Ireland, learning and playing traditional Celtic music, before moving out to the coast of North Wales coast to play and write, and to study Celtic music. During this time he was playing and recording with folk musicians such as Michael McGoldrick, Kate Rusby, John McCusker, Karen Matheson (Capercaille) and John Joe Kelly. Yates was a featured solo artist in Belfast Open House Festival's "Trad with a Difference" evening as the only person ever to successfully interpret Irish traditional styles onto the trumpet.
Yates later formed the band e2K, a group influenced by jazz, English folksong, Irish melodies and rhythms from Ghana (West Africa). It was with this group that Yates secured a two-album deal with the London-based independent record label Topic Records.[2]
Yates was a featured soloist in the Manchester Jazz Festival 2005 special commission alongside pianist John Taylor. It was at this festival that Yates debuted his own project "New Origins". The band later recorded in March the same year and released their album Neil Yates: New Origins,[3] on Yates' own label, Carnyx Records.
As a composer Yates was commissioned to write "Sketches of a Northern Town" for Manchester Jazz Festival 2006, also performed at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2007[4] and later to write "Surroundings" – an antiphonal suite for jazz orchestra that premiered at Manchester Jazz Festival 2010.
In November 2011 British jazz label Edition Records released Yates' second album, Neil Yates: Five Countries.[5]
