Porch Couch

A porch, a couch, a fiddle, a banjo. A dog sitting at your feet. If this is your idea of heaven, you’re going to dig Porch Couch, two of Canada’s most accomplished acoustic musicians paired up as an old-time duo.

Robert Alan Mackie is best known as double bassist, but he’s also a “smokin’ fiddler of European and Appalachian tunes,” notes Miles Zurawell, the respected B.C./Alberta dobro and banjo player and frequent Cowichan performer. Originally from Covehead Road, PEI and now living in Toronto, Mackie has been a prolific accompanist in trad, Americana, and jazz communities across Canada, Scandinavia, and Europe. His many experiments in new music often take him into the grey space between these genres. He counts Bella White, Quinn Bachand, and Aerialists as partners on stage and in the studio.

Jaron Freeman-Fox is primarily a violinist/composer who has recently “come clean with my love affair with the banjo.” He has played on over 30 albums (Jayme Stone, Autorickshaw, Josh Van Tassel) and toured the world many times over as a solo artist, frontman or collaborator with bands such as Delhi 2 Dublin, The David Woodhead Confabulation and Ben Caplan. Freeman-Fox fuses his roots of Celtic and bluegrass fiddling with his study of Indian classical music and jazz, while playing the 5-string violins of his late mentor, fiddle pioneer Oliver Schroer. Jaron has performed in Brunei, Indonesia, India, toured Europe four times, and played every sort of festival, club and theatre throughout the US and across Canada, for crowds of over 100,000, royalty, and audiences dressed as wizards or gorillas. Now based out of Toronto, Jaron is currently touring full time, in high demand as a producer, session musician and collaborator.