Jason and Pharis Romero form one of the most respected music acts on the old-time, country roots stage today. They will be performing in concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 14 at Carlin Hall.
Consummate musicians, the pair has entertained audiences all over North America with their unique blend of traditional music, sung with contemporary lyrics – songs that tug at the heart one moment and have your toes tapping the next.
The duo met in 2007 at an old-time fiddle jam in Victoria. They soon began performing together in the Haints, an old-style string band with renowned Appalachian fiddler Erynn Marshall. The group’s 2009 CD, Shout Monah, earned two Canadian Folk Music Award nominations.
The following year Jason and Pharis began performing together as a duo and in 2011 released their first CD, A Passing Glimpse. It won both a CFMA and Independent Music Award and went to number one on American Folk Radio.
The CD was also named one of the best albums of the year by Folk Alley, an Internet radio station. Last year, the duo received a 2012 Canadian Folk Music Award for Emerging Artist of the Year and a 2012 Independent Music Award for Americana Album of the Year.
“While adhering to the traditional sound, their newest CD, Long Gone Out West Blues, consists mostly of original material. The album was recorded in their home, using mobile gear trucked in by the duo’s Portland-based co-producer, Ivan Rosenberg.
All the music on the CD was played on vintage and/or hand-built instruments including Pharis’ pre-war Martin guitar and Jason’s handmade banjos and resophonic guitar.
Pharis says she has been playing music most of her life.
“My dad was a great singer and songwriter in the classic country and folk traditions. My younger sisters and I used to get up on stage with him and sing along to songs we’d been hearing since we were born,” she says. “This morphed into playing at country music festivals and other events as the Patenaude Family Band – my dad on guitar, us three girls on vocals and various instruments. And yup, my mom did sometimes dress us up in matching outfits.”
Pharis would go on to study classical piano and voice at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. But it was in the late 1990s, while taking some songwriting classes for credit, that she started playing bluegrass and old- time guitar.
Originally from Colusa, Calif., Jason started playing banjo when he was 20. Before then, he says “I was listening to Led Zeppelin and the Cream – but I didn’t play any music. One night I heard a traditional Irish band with a banjo player and was so drawn to the sound of the banjo that I went out and bought one and started taking lessons.
“I was a closet picker for the next 10 years, listening to all sorts of banjo greats like Tony Trischka, Bela Fleck, and Earl Scruggs.”
When he moved to Humboldt County in 1997, Jason started playing banjo with a few bluegrass bands and listening to more of the early bluegrass music, which led him straight to old-time music.
Jason met Pharis, fell in love, moved to Canada in 2007 to be with her and started playing more and more of the music they both felt deeply about, all the while establishing himself as one of the most respected banjo-makers in the world, with a client list that includes Ricky Skaggs.
The couple currently live in the tiny community of Horsefly, B.C. – population 700.
“We wake up every morning grateful for the way we earn our living,” says Pharis. “We spend our days together, at home on a piece of property out in the woods, writing, playing, practising – and doing what we would be doing anyway, whether we were getting paid for it or not. It is remarkable and strange how two of our major passions in life are so intertwined.”
On a typical summer evening, after working all day doing inlay or oiling banjo necks, the couple go for a walk around the property and then return to work on some new song, adds Jason.
What better evening to come out and share Jason and Pharis Romero’s deep and abiding love of traditional, old time music than Feb. 14 – Valentine’s Day?
Tickets for the show are $15 and are available at Acorn Music.