Fiona Hunter & Tom Gibbs

Now an award-winning singer in her own right, Fiona Hunter first came to the wider folk music audience’s attention when she joined the Scots song champions Malinky in 2005, having learned traditional songs first-hand from the Perthshire-based Stewart family, as well as through formal studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

With Malinky, Fiona has toured internationally and features on four of their albums. In 2014 she released her eponymous first solo album, featuring her interpretations of songs from both the lowlands and Highlands of Scotland The album and subsequent concerts earned glowing reviews and in 2015 Fiona won the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards’ Scots Singer of the Year title.

Further acclaim came when Fiona sang with the large-scale Grit Orchestra, formed to celebrate the music of maverick techno-folk musician Martyn Bennett, at Celtic Connections on the tenth anniversary of Bennett’s death in 2015. The orchestra, with Fiona ably taking on the daunting role of singing ‘Move’, as sung by Sheila Stewart on Bennett’s Grit album, has gone on to appear at the prestigious WOMAD festival and at Edinburgh International Festival, most recently in August 2024

The Grit Orchestra subsequently made a triumphant return to Celtic Connections in 2018, playing to a capacity audience of 13,000 at Glasgow’s Hydro arena. This time, Fiona sang ‘Blackbird/What a Voice’, from the singing of Lizzie Higgins, as stunt cyclist Danny MacAskill recreated his YouTube sensation climb of the Isle of Skye’s Black Cuillin Ridge on a scale model onstage.

Fiona released her second solo album in 2022, produced by her Malinky colleague Mike Vass and featuring songs learned directly from mentors including Ray Fisher, Alison McMorland and Sheila Stewart.

For this concert, Fiona is accompanied by Tom Gibbs – one of Scotland’s finest jazz pianists, currently leading his own trio and also occupying the piano chair in the Brian Molley Quartet.