Ciccone & Cotter

Top Canadian Fiddler Meets California-Celtic Folky!

After a few years spent on opposite coasts of different countries working on separate artistic projects, Adrianna Ciccone and Colin Cotter - longtime pals and creative collaborators - have reunited to make music together once more!

With a “distinctive stamp and swing that is both rooted and infectious,” Adrianna Ciccone’s fiddling crosses back and forth across the North American continent with ease as she masterfully showcases Cape Breton reels, crooked French-Canadian brandys, and the rollicking rhythms of Ottawa Valley step-dancing tunes before journeying way down south for Southern Appalachian string band tunes one moment and putting her Irish and Métis influences on display the next. This is dance music through and through – hearing the deep groove and exacting rhythms in her fiddling, it comes as no surprise that Adrianna is an award-winning stepdancer in addition to being a superlative fiddler.

Raised in the Ottawa Valley fiddle tradition and greatly inspired by Québécois fiddling, Adrianna cut her teeth at fiddle camps across Ontario and Canada before going on to make a name for herself collecting awards from national and international fiddle competitions. With an impressive array of accolades to her name and an undeniable passion for the fiddle in tow, Adrianna moved to Boston where she attended and graduated from Berklee College of Music. In 2015, Adrianna released her Bruce Molsky-produced debut album, The Back of Winter, for which she won Instrumental Solo Artist of the Year at the 2015 Canadian Folk Music Awards. These days you can find her teaching fiddle and running Merry Time Music Co. - a small music school in Halifax / Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia.

Colin Cotter is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, and creative-at-large from the San Francisco Bay Area. He has played gigs from coast to coast in the USA, toured internationally in Canada, Ireland, and Spain, and teaches regularly at some of the top folk music camps in the country.

Surrounded by music his whole life, Colin grew up immersed in Irish, Finnish, and American folk music. When he was four years old, his mom had him pick up the fiddle and began teaching him to play the tunes she had learned as a child, building on several generations of a family tradition in Finnish folk music. With a few Finnish tunes under his fingers and a knack for rattling off classic Irish ballads, he attended Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School as a kid one summer and fell in love with Scottish and Irish fiddle music, jigs and reels soon coming to define his musical journey for a time. In addition to being a fine fiddler and singer, Colin is an accomplished guitarist, having taken to the instrument both for the practical purpose of accompanying himself singing and out of a deep affinity for sitting in the rhythmic belly of the beast when playing with fiddlers. A self-taught guitarist, he has crafted a unique approach to expressing on the instrument that he brings to collaborations with artists from across the musical spectrum.

While playing live is where his heart resides, Colin has co-produced and released several studio albums over the years with bands he co-founded: MAC (Perfectly Manufactured Reality, 2018) and A Thousand Years at Sea (Tree Pool, 2014; The Stillness Here, 2012; We Will Fall Apart, 2011; Silver Shores Await, 2009). He currently has several musical irons in the fire and looks forward to continuing to share new musical explorations both in and out of Celtic music that showcase a synthesis of influences avant-garde and traditional.