This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #103 (December 2002 / January 2003). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

April Verch
Fiddle Fusion
by Tom Nelligan

Canadian fiddler and stepdancer April Verch is still in her early 20s, but she has all the poise and confidence of a veteran performer. That's because she is one, having been playing and dancing in front of audiences since she was a small child. An animated sprite with a flashing smile and infectious energy, she's an intuitive performer who enlivens a stage with her enthusiasm and impresses a listener with her command of a wide variety of fiddle styles ranging from traditional tunes to jazzy fusion.

In the course of a typical set, the versatile Verch touches musical points of reference that extend from France and the British Isles through Cape Breton, Québec, and Ontario, down to Appalachia and Texas, all the way through to Brazil. Her eclecticism is one key to her creative appeal, her vivacious personality another. She can faithfully reproduce a variety of traditional styles, but like many other talented young fiddlers, she sees her mission as blending influences to make music that is ultimately her own. Her technical skills, ear for melody, and rhythmic drive are matched by her sense of fun, all of which have pointed her toward a career as a major contributor to the ongoing evolution of North American fiddle styles.

Verch grew up in Pembroke, Ontario, a small town about a hundred miles west of Ottawa. Like other Ottawa Valley towns, it sits along the Ontario-Québec border, where English and French cultures and musical styles meet. Her father, Ralph, is an amateur guitarist, fiddler, and country singer, but it is her older sister, Tawnya, who had taken up stepdancing, whom Verch credits for her first attraction to music. "Because we were out in the country, my sister had no friends to play with," she recalled between sets at last July's New Bedford Summerfest. "So my parents put her into stepdancing just so she could meet some other kids. When I came along, I started dancing just to be like her. I started lessons when I was three. My mom always says I danced before I walked, but I don't think that was true! And then as soon as I started dancing and heard the fiddle music, I was drawn to it. I saw the fiddle players and immediately wanted to be one. And my parents didn't believe me; they thought it was a phase I was going through, and they thought I wouldn't have enough of an attention span, that young, to practice two things. So they didn't get me a fiddle till I was six. Then they finally gave in. I guess I had bugged them long enough that they decided to let me give it a try!"

Like many fiddlers of her generation from both North America and the British Isles, Verch spent a lot of time learning her craft through dance and fiddle contests. "We traveled the competition circuit for a long time," she explained, "and in Ontario therea contest somewhere every weekend, starting at the end of May until the first weekend in September. So we spent our summers doing that. I was strongly influenced by stepdancing music, but also by the contest fiddling, and at that point it was mostly old-time Canadian influences only. I really wasn't listening to much else early on." She counts about 400 competition awards on her résumé, including 1998 Canadian Open Fiddle Champion.

Clearly a precocious musician, Verch released two self-produced CDs before she was out of high school, the first called Springtime Fiddle. "I think I was 13 when it was recorded. I wanted to put out an album, and my parents, when I started competing and performing, would not give me my money. They would put it in a bank account for me. And so when I was that age they said, 'There's probably enough in that account now, so if you are serious about wanting to [make a CD], it's yours.' And that was a really cool experience at that age. I can remember coming home when they finally arrived, looking at it, going, 'Wow! I have a CD!' Little did I know then that if it wasn't in the stores it meant nothing!" she laughed.

"It was good, I think. I think it helped me musically mature quicker, doing that recording, because it caused me to think about things, how I wanted people to hear things, much earlier than I would have otherwise. Then when we got all the money back from that one we made another [Fiddle Talk] when I was about 16, and then it became a thing where people were asking for them, like, do you have a new one this year? And I realized, hey, people are listening to them! So I guess that's how it got going."

The young Verch also toured across Canada in a group called the Dueling Dancers, comprising the two Verch sisters and a pair of brothers, Jon and Nathan Pilatzke, playing both competitions and concerts. "We danced and sang and played fiddle," she said, "and my sister played piano, and one of the brothers played drums. We actually performed a lot together. It was a lot of fun. I think it was a very good building block in gaining experience without having to go out there by yourself at first and learn how to perform. All the hard parts that don't come naturally, like talking to the audience or making sure they're included, would be hard to do alone. It gave me a lot of good experience. My sister was the oldest, and when she left to go to college, and then one of the brothers left, we realized it was time. We knew it wouldn't last forever. And I was ready at that point to go on my own. I was kind of waiting for it then."

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #103 (Dec. '02/Jan. '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.