April Verch in Concert

www.aprilverch.com/

Maybe it's something in the water, in the blood. Maybe it's the long winters that drive people to warm themselves with wild music and dance. Canada continues to produce a fine crop of young traditional musicians.

Of these, April Verch is a stellar example. As a pre-schooler, she developed a fierce love for step dancing and fiddle in the distinctive regional style of Ontario's Ottawa Valley. By the time she finished high school, she had criss-crossed Canada performing, teaching, recording three albums, and winning hundreds of fiddle and dance contests. She was the first and, thus far, only woman to win both the Canadian Grand Masters and the Canadian Open Fiddle Championships.

After a year at Boston's Berklee School of Music, where she devoured new genres and techniques, she became a full-time performer with percussionist husband Marc Bru. In 2000, she was signed as a Rounder Records artist, her formidable skill, confidence, and soul belying her age of twenty. She promptly produced Verchuosity, a CD that garnered a JUNO (Canadian "Grammy") and introduced her to audiences in the USA, where she has played the gamut from intimate coffeehouses to the Kennedy Center.

In 2003, April Verch found a new talent for singing, and employed it a CD produced by Bruce Molsky. From Where I Stand is a dazzling mix of old-time Carter Family, ripping French Canadian reels, original tunes, Appalachian, and Latin-infused music. Her 2006 CD, Take Me Back, was produced by Dirk Powell (of the Cold Mountain soundtrack). Here her voice has grown in eloquence, matching the limberness of her fiddle and feet as she boldly takes on whatever styles she loves: soulful country, bluegrass, Cajun, Texas swing, Scandinavian, jazz fusion, profound love songs, and always the backbone of rare traditional Canadian songs and dance tunes.

These musical explorations are not hollow eclecticism, but a product of virtuosity and passion. April Verch and her band respect tradition but deliver it with freshness and fire.

Please join the Cornell Folk Song Society in welcoming April Verch and Company to open the Spring 2007 season. It will be a high-energy romp!

Tickets are available at Ludgate Farm Market, Ithaca Guitar Works, Greenstar Co-op, Small World Music, and, if any are left, at the door. You may also order tickets online and by mail: SASE to CFSC, PO Box 481, Ithaca, NY 14851.

(Margaret Shepard)

For information about the concert, contact

• Ken McKinney at 607.564.1998
• or the Cornell Folk Song Society.

Author:	Ted Crane
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