Canadian singer and fiddler April Verch grew up steeped in the traditional string music of the Ottawa Valley. She began step dancing at the age of 3, picked up the fiddle at age 6 and honed her skills performing at community country dances.
By the time she graduated from Berklee College of Music, she had won some of Canada’s top fiddle competitions.
Although she was incredibly talented at a young age, Verch noticed a difference between the reception her playing received and the effect the elder fiddlers had on the crowd at dances.
When you’re a young kid learning to play, you seem to think that faster is better and you want to learn all of the tunes that your friends are playing,” Verch says. “I was like, ‘Listen to all of these notes that I can play!’And my dad was like, ‘Yeah, but when you play, people are just sitting there.’”
April observed the elder fiddlers and learned a valuable lesson about performance.
“A lot of my favorite fiddlers aren’t the cleanest players. They don’t have the best tone — they’re not even always in tune. It might be a little scratchy, but they just have this unspeakable groove that is what it’s all about,” Verch says. “Most of the traditional music that we play is associated with some kind of dance tradition and that’s what it’s supposed to do, make people feel like either getting up and dancing or at least grooving along in their seat.”
This year, April released her 10th album, “Newpart.” The title refers to her childhood home, where she played music with her family and continues to rehearse and write new material.
The “Newpart” was a room added onto her parents’ house the year she was born. It’s a cozy little space infused with memories and ’70s shag carpet.
“It is pretty amazing,” she says. “It’s like stepping back in time. There is a comfort there for me, for sure.”
The new album features several tunes from the pre-World War II Vaudeville era. When she and her trio began working with producer Casey Driessen, she told him, “I feel like there is this automatic assumption that every time I put out a new record, there will be something different, something new.
“Everybody wants to know what’s different this time. You know, I’m really happy about our sound. I love what we play and I want to do more of the same.”
Although he understood her dilemma, Driessen gave Verch a playlist of old songs he thought she could adapt for a string band.
“That’s when I realized it is timeless and this stuff translates and I really love it, I just didn’t know it,” Verch says with a laugh.
On top of her lovely singing and virtuosic fiddling, she is also a mesmerizing step dancer. Dancing is always a big part of Verch’s live performances, but it has been a challenge to incorporate her footwork into the audio recordings. A special effort was made to highlight her talent on the latest recording.
“The new album is the first time we’ve incorporated just foot percussion, so not straight-up step dancing, but using my feet so that it sort of sounds like a brush on a snare drum while singing,” she says.
Verch will be performing at The Pickin’ Parlor with her trio: Hayes Griffin on guitar and Cody Walterson on banjo and bass. The show is also going to be live streamed.
“It’s our first time at The Pickin’ Parlor, which is really exciting,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite types of venues to play, where it’s intimate and it’s cool that people can watch from far away.”
The trio will be playing several styles of music on a mix of different instruments and, of course, there will be a lot of dancing.
She humbly adds, “I think it should be a good night.”