There are advantages to being one woman with a harp in a van, reflects Esther Swift, the inventive, genre-defying harpist about to embark on a solo Scottish tour with that selfsame harp – the big, classical kind – and van, which will take her from Edinburgh to venues as far afield as Caithness and North Uist, not to mention a couple of dates south of the Border.

“Hopefully my little van will be okay,” she laughs, “but I really like touring on my own, because you can go at your own pace and you can join other people’s tribes. If you’re in a band then you’re sort of beholden to the band and their plans.”

Swift, based in Edinburgh, is actually speaking via Zoom while on such a solo tour of New Zealand’s North Island. Like the forthcoming Scottish tour, it can involve quite small venues: “I just love playing for rural communities. It’s my dream gig.”

While the Scottish jaunt kicks off in Edinburgh on 11 March, it’s preceded by a Leeds gig on the 4th, while the end of April sees her head down to Sussex and the Nest Collective’s Singing with Nightingales project with Sam Lee.

Whatever the venue, audiences are treated to the harpist’s intimate yet mercurial vocal delivery, often of her settings of work by poets she loves, such as Edwin Morgan, WB Yeats and Carol Ann Duffy.

She favours pedal harp rather than clarsach – a big beast to travel with? “Yes. I might change my mind in a few years, but I love it, because its chromaticism allows me to do more experimental harmony.”

Swift is equally at home performing with folk or jazz musicians as with string ensembles, or for that matter something as off the wall as The Call, enacted on the sands near Portobello. For that she took up signal flags, rather than harp, to direct an instrumental stramash involving a (socially distanced) assembly of musicians, all of whom had hitherto been confined at home by lockdown.

Her poetry settings shift in impact from the lingering yearning of Edwin Morgan’s One Cigarette, intoned over glowing chords, to the biting poetic put-down of Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Icarus, originally a Manchester Jazz Festival commission, with appropriately abrasive jazz ensemble plus additional harps and strings.

On the solo tour, she will perform stripped-down arrangements of Duffy’s writing, including the former Poet Laureate’s beautiful poem for her daughter, Light Gatherer. One Cigarette and other Morgan material will also feature, as well as work by another poet Swift admires, Rachel McCrum.

She’ll also include parts of an earlier piece she performed at a pre-pandemic Celtic Connections, The Flood, evoking the Tweed inundating into her home town of Peebles, and also draw from last year’s Celtic Connections New Voices Commission, Sound Effects: “It reflects on the pandemic and I suppose feelings of ritual and connection and isolation, as well as hope for the future.”

Her own future, post-tour, involves recording her first solo album, while another album from her Twelfth Day partnership with Orcadian fiddler Catriona Price should follow next year.

Educated at Edinburgh’s St Mary’s Music School and at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Swift revisited the former a few years ago to record an EP in St Mary’s Cathedral where she was once a chorister – “I wanted to recreate the feeling of learning to sing in that amazing building.”

That choral grounding is at least partly the key to her non-pigeonhole-able music: “I think all of my music has a basis in my folk roots and also my choral roots. That’s already a weird combination, but with that as a basis I also get really influenced by minimalist composers and also by jazz – I love jazz of all kinds, both contemporary and classic jazz. I just do what I do, I suppose.”

Esther Swift’s Scottish tour starts at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, on 11 March. Full details at www.estherswift.co.uk

Esther Swift prepares to embark on a solo harp-and-van odyssey