Ross and Ryan Couper
The Festival is delighted that renowned Shetland Fiddler Ross Couper is able to make the trip home to be part of the 40th Shetland Folk Festival, to appear in a duo with his brother Ryan but also as resident Club musician for the weekend.
Brothers Ross and Ryan Couper, hail from an incredibly musical family including their mother, renowned fiddle teacher Margaret Robertson. They grew up making music together and in the depths of lockdown, decided to record an album together - "And Den Dey Made Tae".
The album celebrates who they are as players and where they have come from and we are absolutely delighted to showcase them as part of our big Friday Clickimin concert this year.
Ryan will be familiar to many as the multi-instrumentalist who performs with popular Shetland folk acts including Vair and CRAC.
Ross has a significnant profile on the Scottish folk scene. After being a student at the Anderson High School in Lerwick, he left Shetland to study at Plockton Centre of Excellence for Traditional Music, the first Shetlander to do so and went on to obtain a degree in Folk and Traditional Music at Newcastle University.
Through this time he played with many different groups including award-winning band Bodega. With Bodega he toured all over Europe and America, which is when he met Peatbog Faeries at Milwaukee Irish Festival.
Now touring world wide with the Peatbogs full time and in a duo with guitar and flute extraordinaire Tom Oakes, Ross is always respectful of his native Shetland style and continues to look for new ways of playing exciting fiddle music in whatever guise you find him in.
Similar to Hamish Napier who is making the trip north for the 40th, Ross will be assisting with the delivery of our Festival Club programming this year and you’ll find him firing up many a tune over the weekend! Hamish and Ross know each other well from the session scene in Glasgow and we've already asked them to pair up, spontaneously, over the weekend. Joining them in their unplanned musical adventure will be Kevin Henderson who is also making the trip home for the 40th. It's certain to be a quiet affair!
