Hannah Read

Hannah Read’s music straddles both sides of the Atlantic. She is a versatile collaborator and forges her own singular musical landscape that draws from Scottish and American folk traditions. Equally at home improvising on fiddle, playing traditional Scottish music or delivering finely wrought original songs, she is an artist who can’t be pinned down to one continent, one city, one project, one mode of expression.

After growing up singing and playing fiddle in Scotland’s rich traditional music community, Hannah deepened her musicianship studying at The City of Edinburgh Music School, The American School of Modern Music in Paris, and finally at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she immersed herself in the American folk traditions that had compelled her to cross the Atlantic.

As a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader, Hannah released her full-length debut Way Out I’ll Wander on Hudson Records in 2018. The album’s “nine gorgeous originals” (The Guardian) unfurl around Hannah’s sterling vocal and deft instrumental work on fiddle and guitar. The songs tell stories of a life lived in transit, conjuring its most vivid characters and images from Hannah’s youth in Edinburgh and on the Isle of Eigg, a remote island off the western coast of Scotland.

Hannah is in demand as a fiddler, guitar player and vocalist. She contributed to the English/Scottish folk supergroup Songs of Separation. She’s also an accomplished music instructor, appearing on faculty at Louisiana’s Blackpot Camp, Miles of Music Camp, The Omega Institute and Shetland Songwriting Festival. Hannah’s animating principles of curiosity and adventurousness run through all her work, and she continues to interweave these varied musical experiences from Scotland to New York and back again.

photo © Jonathon Cuff