Vancouver based songstress Jenny Ritter is best known for spending 10 years playing with popular B.C. folk trio the Gruff, but for the past couple years she has been doing her own thing.
She plays the South Country Fair, Saturday afternoon on the East Stage.
“It’s been a long time since I was in Lethbridge. Probably in 2008 with the Gruff,” Ritter observed, enjoying a rare day off. The Gruff stopped by Lethbridge during their farewell tour in 2010.
“ So I’m excited to be coming back. I’ve never played the South Country Fair before,” she said.
“ I love festivals and I love Southern Alberta, so if I get to play a festival and go to Southern Alberta, then it’s perfect,” she said, adding she and her band including Fish and Bird’s Adam Iredale-Gray and Ryan Boeur plus his sister / fiddler/ vocalist Elise Boeur as well as bassist Wynston Minckler.
When the Gruff disbanded in2010, Ritter took a couple years off to do some soul searching, before realizing how much she missed music.
“ So I decided to form a band under my own name. But what I’ve really been doing is working with two rock and roll choirs,” she said, adding the choirs perform modern rock hits choral style.
“ We’ve been doing a lot of Can Con, but we also perform everything from Bruce Springsteen to Joel Plaskett and Nirvana,” she enthused, adding each choir has 35-40 members, for which she arranges the music for.
“ The best thing is it’s my own thing, so If I want to tour, I tell them ‘we’re taking a break,” she enthused.
“ I get a lot of e-mails every day from people who want to join, so I spend a lot of time telling them no,” she said.
While her band mates include members of Fish & Bird, no Fish and Bird or the Gruff songs make it into the set.
She booked a quick tour around the South Country Fait including a July 17 show at the Twin Butte General store.
“I have a song a called General Store which a lot of people think is about the general store in Twin Butte, where I also have a gig. But it isn’t. It’s about another general store, though it would be fun to rearrange the song,” she said.
“I did a Home Routes Tour of Northern Alberta, but it will be nice to be down south again,” she said.
She is getting ready to release her second solo album with the band called “Raised by Wolves, ” is to be released Sept. 8 along with the first video for “Wolf Wife.”
“It’s been ready for a long time, but I want to do it right. I’m doing a video for it, ” she said.
She keeps in touch with the other members of the Gruff, especially upright bassist Terri Upton.
“She moved to Vancouver too and she lives a block away from me, so we’re literally neighbours. I wanted to work with her, but she’s so busy,” she said, adding the third Gruff, Phaedra Kemp is still in Victoria, so they don’t keep in touch as much.
— By Richard Amery, L.A. Beat Editor
