Fionna Duncan (November 5, 1939 - December 6, 2022) was a much-loved figure on the Scottish jazz scene whose circle of admirers and musical associates extended into Europe and the U.S. She was widely regarded as the first lady of Scottish jazz.
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| Fionna in 1955 |
The daughter of marine engineer Andrew Duncan and his wife Agnes, Duncan was born into a musical family. Her older brother and sister both played piano; Fionna didn’t, so took up singing. Three years after her birth the family moved from their house at Portincaple on Loch Long to Glasgow’s King’s Park and thence to Rutherglen, while retaining the Portincaple house which would later become her home. She went on to attend Rutherglen Academy, a hotbed of the folk revival thanks to its Ballad and Blues Club established by Norman Buchan. A jazz-loving history teacher, sensing her interest, asked her parents’ permission to take her and her brother to see the formidable Scottish clarinettist Sandy Brown.
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| Fionna, Glasgow 1958 |
By sixteen, while still at school, she was singing in talent competitions and with local jazz bands. One competition win resulted in her taking home an iron and an electric kettle. An audition for television and the chance to make a recording were also part of the prize. This was overshadowed shortly afterwards when, during a family trip to the U.S., where she sang on radio and TV, the prestigious Riverside Records offered Fionna a recording contract. Not wishing to take up residence in the States, a stipulation of the deal, she turned it down and, with it, the chance to become label-mates with the celebrated pianists Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, and saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane.
Fionna didn’t have too long to wait before she made her recording debut, however. Back in Glasgow, having appeared on the weekly TV show, Skiffle Club, with the Joe Gordon Folk Four, and having sung with the Steadfast Jazz Band, Fionna entered another talent competition, Stars In Your Eyes, this time on TV. Not only did she win the competition but at the auditions she met clarinettist Forrie Cairns, with whom she would go on to work into the 2000s. Cairns asked Fionna to join his band and he was taken aback when she said she’d have to ask her mother.
With her mother’s blessing Fionna joined Cairns’ All-Stars
and then, in 1959, Fionna and Forrie were invited to join the Clyde Valley
Stompers, a traditional jazz band from Glasgow that became known around the
world in the 1950s and early 1960s, and were once described as "the
Scottish sultans of trad jazz swing". They recorded the album, Have Tartan
Will Trad, that same year and began a hectic schedule of live performances and
television and radio appearances.
She continued touring until 1964. She took up residence in London, where she hosted the Georgian Nightclub in the West End, singing with Kenny Ball and Humphrey Lyttelton, among other prominent musicians of the time. Then, in 1971, she was back on the road, although not for long, as an accident abroad resulted in her suffering five slipped discs and being hospitalised for a year. At this point Fionna decided to change careers. She trained as a hairdresser and although this freed her from the uncertainty of the music business, the lure of the microphone and telling stories in song pulled her back to performing. Back in Scotland again, she sang with George Penman’s Jazzmen and 1981, she and Cairns took part in the Clyde Valley Stompers reunion, which included tours of the UK and Canada.
In 1985, having appeared at events such as Sacramento Jazz Festival with Edinburgh Jazz Festival founder Mike Hart’s band, Fionna put together her own group with her partner, bassist Ronnie Rae, Ronnie’s son John on drums and Brian Kellock on piano. Until John Rae moved to New Zealand in 2008, this would remain her first call band. The Raes and Kellock also became the house trio for Fionna’s Vocal Jazz Workshops, an idea she picked up in California when her friend and fellow singer Madeline Eastman gave Fionna a frank assessment of her singing.
Fionna continued to sing and teach into her seventies and was rewarded with a nomination at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards for her services to education in 2008. The following year she was voted Best Jazz Vocalist at the Scottish Jazz Awards and in 2019 her contribution to the music was recognised with the Lifetime Achievement accolade, again at the Scottish Jazz Awards. Living latterly in Pathhead, Midlothian, she finally succumbed at the age of 83 years, to an aortic aneurysm on 6 December 2022.
(Edited from obits @ The Scotsman & The Herald)