By Madeline Baker, Times-Chronicle
Pharis and Jason Romero, the folk-roots duo playing Osoyoos’s Spring Festival on Wednesday, May 4, are no newcomers to the Canadian music scene. In fact, even if you lack any familiarity with their music, you’re likely to get the feeling that you’ve heard them before.
Since moving from a purely instrumental sound on their 2011 debut as The Haints to a more vocally-focused style, Pharis & Jason have released five albums that have won them three Juno awards, seven Country Folk Music Awards, and earned them a nomination for album of the year at the International Folk Music Awards.
Pharis & Jason
Pharis’s rich voice brings to mind 1960s folk greats like Judy Collins, while Jason anchors their harmonies and brings vulnerability to his lead vocals with a textured and warm take on Bob Dylan. Their instrumentals are deceptively lush, with layers of intricate fingerpicking that make two guitars or a guitar and banjo sound like a full orchestra.
A review by Herald Scotland called them “the future of a bygone sound,” referring to the uncanny authenticity of their songs to the style in which they’re crafted; a casual listener might assume that their original catalogue is actually composed of standards from a bygone era, only to be shocked by the discovery that they’re contemporary.
That indistinguishability makes the duo a rare purveyor of perfectly crafted nostalgia, a familiar but contemporary sound that can only be found in their albums.
While Pharis grew up steeped in folk and country music thanks to her father, with whom she started performing live at the tender age of four, Jason’s path to their sweet, rootsy sound wasn’t so direct. In fact, long before he ever played or sang a note in any style, Jason fell in love not with a genre, but an instrument.
“When he was about 19, he walked into a bar and saw a banjo player playing with an Irish band,” Pharis says of her husband, who had never played a note on any instrument before that day. “Immediately, it was like a light switch went off in his brain, and he was obsessed.”
Jason wasn’t content simply to learn the banjo and explore the varied styles of music in which it was featured. Within 10 years he had started J. Romero Banjos to promote and sell his custom builds, and as the business approaches its 20th anniversary in 2022, it’s still thriving.
For Pharis and Jason, building banjos isn’t a side business – it’s an integral part of their process when creating music, and one of the secrets behind their unique take on a classic sound.
“I’ll write a new song and bring it to Jason, or he’ll have an idea for a tune, and he’ll think: “I just can’t get the right tone out of this instrument I have, so I’m going to take that instrument and put different strings on it or change the head,” or it might start fermenting the ideas to build an entirely new instrument,” says Pharis.
“He’s always thinking about tone and new ideas and interesting approaches. The instruments themselves are really intertwined with the music that we’re creating.”
Another integral piece of the puzzle is Pharis’s hometown and the couple’s current residence: Horsefly, BC, an old village nestled between the Cariboo Mountains and Quesnel Lake in the province’s rugged north, where Pharis’s family first settled in the 1800s.
“We’re both really drawn to being outside and exploring, getting to know nature, that whole life, and that rhythm is a huge inspiration to the music that we write,” Pharis explains. “When I’m songwriting, a lot of the time my songs come directly from the rhythm of paddling a canoe, or the rhythm of walking, or the feeling that I get when my nose is stuck as close as I can get to a bed of moss.”
“When you look through our catalogue of songs, the inspirations, over and over again, come from being outside in the garden, the feeling of September in the mountains, and all of that.”
Pharis believes that the thriving folk and country-bluegrass scene on Canada’s west coast, which also includes fellow Spring Festival performers Jackson Hollow, stems from the music’s strong oral tradition and its accessibility to people at all levels of musical knowledge.
With a broad back canon of songs built from two or three guitar chords, full of timeless emotions delivered in the form of poignant stories, Pharis has seen folk standards passed between families, friends, and entire communities, by performers of all ages.
“I’m all about music feeling accessible, and these old songs seem to have a life that continues on. They’re relatable. They’re learnable. You can easily sing along with them. That’s a huge part of music for me and for Jason, the community.”
Osoyoos will receive a special sneak preview of Pharis & Jason’s latest earthy creations at their Spring Festival show, as they’ve got a new album set to release this coming summer and look forward to testing some of the compositions in front of an audience.
The new album, which was recorded entirely in an old barn on their Horsefly property, will consist entirely of banjo instrumentals by Jason with guest appearances from many of their musical friends.
The Romeros will open the Spring Festival with their performance at Osoyoos Community Theatre on Wednesday, May 4, with doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a 7:30 p.m. start. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased online through the Venables Theatre Box Office at venablestheatre.ca.
More information about the Osoyoos Spring Festival and its many other performers can be found at the Arts Council website, osoyoosartscouncil.com.
