There aren’t a lot of French Canadians in Grand Forks , B.C. but sometimes you never know where life will take you.
So New Brunswick born Suzanne LeClerc and her musical partner Bryn Wilkin, originally from Ontario and England, ended up in Grand Forks where they bonded over their love for Acadian and French Canadian folk music and formed the duo Vazzy. Their June 26 show at the Lethbridge FOlk Club Wolf’s Den has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
They just released their second CD “En Passant By The Way” which has already been nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award for Francophone Album of the Year.
“It’s 13 tracks of traditional instruments and songs. There’s more instrumental songs. And it’s 65 minutes long, ” described Suzanne LeClerc, who plays harmonica, foot percussion, bodhran, jaw’s harp, spoons, doumbek and tambourine and sings. Bryn Wilkin plays fiddle, tenor banjo, mandolin, oud, early guitar and bagpipes.
“We released it just in time for the deadline for the Western Canadian Music Awards,” she added.
“ We’re very grateful for the attention,” she continued, adding the nomination will hopefully get the duo more attention and help them get into bigger folk festivals.
“ There’s more instrumentals. There’s six songs and seven instrumentals but the instrumentals are in sets,” she said.
“We play for a lot of anglophone as well as francophone audiences. So it’s a good idea to have a mixture of songs. If they understand it, it’s more interesting for them,” she said.
“It’s a very happy and lively and upbeat set,” she continued.
The CD includes their own arrangements of a songs , traditional French Canadian and Acadian and a variety of tunes, some dating back to the twelfth century.
“And there’s lilting traditional Irish tunes,” she said.
“It’s hard to find French Canadian music in B.C. My dad used to sing a lot of old tunes and when we travel to Eastern Canada we go to a lot of garage sales and old churches finding old song books,“ she said.
“ There’s very little of it in B.C.”
LeClerc moved to B.C. From New Brunswick in 1980 for school and stayed.
“ I actually wanted to go to Banff to go to the arts school, but never actually made it there,” she said.
She went to school, met her partner, raised some kids and met Bryn, who moved back and forth from Ontario to back to England and France and back to B.C.
They met each other tree planting in northern B.C. and connected musically.
Unfortunately the show has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
