Danny Diamond is a fiddle player from Ireland. He is currently based in Minneapolis, MN, in the USA, where he plays in a duo with multi-instrumentalist and singer Brian Miller. His inventive and soulful fiddle playing draws on a rich family heritage of musical style and repertoire from the north of Ireland.

Past work includes: Music Director and co-creator of the score for Teac Damsa’s multi award-winning dance theatre show Swan Lake / Loch na hEala (2016-2019). International touring included performances in the Sydney Opera House, The Bolshoi, Moscow, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, BAM Brooklyn and Saddlers Wells, London, among others. Danny also co-founded the Irish-Nordic indie folk band Slow Moving Clouds and played with them from 2014-2018.

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Previously Danny toured in Ireland and Europe with Irish traditional band Mórga (2007-2016), releasing two albums along the way. He has also released three solo albums: Fiddle Music (2014) and Elbow Room (2017); along with the duo recordings NORTH (2016, with Conor Caldwell), and Let Fly (2021, with Brian Miller).

Other collaborative work includes What To Bring When We Leave (2018), a performance project with poet Tom French, produced by Solstice Arts Centre; Open Room (2019), a collaboration with dancer Edwina Guckian and writer Vincent Woods; My Father's Kind (2019, 2023), with musicians Macdara Yeates & Sheila Friel and writer Dermot Bolger.

 

In addition to performing, Danny works as a digital humanities consultant and music producer with Atlantic Arts and teaches Irish fiddle with The Center for Irish Music. Current and past consultancy clients include: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN; Center for Irish Music, St. Paul, MN; Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, Ireland; University of Galway, Galway, Ireland.

From 2021-24 Danny worked on a computational musicology research project at University of Galway, Ireland, analysing melodic similarities across European folk music collections as part of the EU Polifonia research consortium. In collaboration with fiddle player and researcher Conor Caldwell, he created The Long Road to Glenties, a unique event combining live performance with a screening of restored archival footage of Irish fiddler John Doherty from the Seeger family collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The Long Road to Glenties was presented at music and arts festivals in Ireland and internationally between 2014-2020.

Recording engineer/producer credits include: Let Fly (Diamond & Miller, 2021); NORTH (Diamond & Caldwell, 2016); Cold Old Fire (Lankum 2014); For the Sake of Auld Decency (Mórga, 2013)