Music scene

April Verch show

CHAMPAIGN — Fiddler, singer and step-dancer April Verch and her band will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at The Upper Bout, 723 N. Neil St., C, as an event of the Champaign-Urbana Folk & Roots Festival.

A cultural icon in Canada, Verch performed at the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has been into traditional music from an early age, having learned it from musicians and teachers in the Ottawa Valley where she grew up as well as from old-timers.

Verch is well-versed in a variety of traditions, among them those of northern Ontario, the Appalachians, the Mississippi River valley, the Louisiana bayou and Brazil, France and the Scottish Highlands. Because of her soprano voice, she is sometimes compared to Champaign native Alison Krauss.

Verch, who has performed at Carnegie Hall, attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston but quit after one year to tour. She had gone to Berklee to study with Matt Glaser, who is on the strings faculty and is the artistic director of Berklee's American Roots Music Program.

Verch and her band are now touring in support of her 10th album, "The Newpart," produced and engineered by Berklee alumnus Casey Driessen. It features songs and tunes that harken back to the vaudeville era and earlier, with pared-down arrangements and instrumentation that includes upright bass, guitar, clawhammer banjo, mandolin, voices, fiddle, and stepping.

Verch at age 3 began lessons in step-dancing, a style indigenous to Ottawa Valley and a year later, with her sister, began winning step-dancing contests. She began taking fiddling lessons at 6.

Advance tickets to her show at The Upper Bout are $15; tickets at the door will be $20. Call 607-8132 for information.