COLUMNS & INTEVIEUWS  Fred van der Vaart

Jake – well I was invited to play here because of  our music but also the fact they knew our music and we won the Juno Award for Tradional Roots album of the year 2025 and  as teenager in 2021 he made his debut with “Retro Man”

Fred - That’s great to hear and congratulations but I hear and read some that you have been playing here before in the Netherlands and will do again in 2026. What describes your music the best?

Jake – well we play Blue-grass from the heart  and and country music and some with a twist into the 50’s Rockabilly and with our Mic sound it makes a nice performance we get a lot of good feedbacks.

Fred -  Do you have any favorite artists or music that made you start in the bluegrass?
Jake - well our family
started way back in the 1800’s but we did hear a lot of the Statler brothers and they play honest Blue-grass so that I grew up with and I started singing at the age of 4 , but I learned to play the banjo and later guitar and in the last 7 years we tried differ-ent performances and with this band now we play 4-5 years together with adding and changing instruments, and we most play in Cana-da and Europe as touring. And maybe we go to the USA to.

Fred – any Favorite artists who influenced you more?
Jake – Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs for sure but myself love Faron Young and a lit-tle of Waylon, but I love the way Earnest Tubb per-forms and entertaining so I try to be like them to a bit because not many try to come up with a entertain-ing show anymore so we try to let people enjoy our showmanship

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Fred – The band you play with now the Sturgeon Riv-er Boys , how did you end up together?
Jake – well they all come a bit from same province in Canada and I had a good friend as Bass player and later there came a other bass player and from there we perform and found oth-er guys / friends who want-ed to join us in this music busyness and now we are Fulltime musicians touring a lot.

Fred – you started your music career and when did you decided to start record-ing?
Jake – well when we knew we play well enough we made 2 EP and 1 album on our own , no special re-cording in studio.
But total we had 3 records now – Everybody but me – Retro man More of me ( got the award for) and last al-bum we present here today is called One more dollar to go and all made as
independent records and till now we are proud of them because they made us win some nice awards like the Saskatchewan country mu-sic awards ( 9x) and be-cause of these we now touring with some great other artists as supporting act  so yeh   it helps us to grow and show our
Entertaining skills and make the best of any tour.

Fred – Well thank you for your short time before do-ing all other stuff here backstage. I go to the front and enjoy your show and do come often.
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