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| Sandra Wong Trio |
Last Friday the Sandra Wong Trio packed the house for the monthly Friday Afternoon Concert Series hosted by the Longmont Council for the Arts and the Senior Center. While the venue is a gymnasium and the platform has no velvet skirting, it is easily accessible for those of us with canes and walkers, and the ticket price ($8 each) is within the reach of those of us on fixed incomes. As I said, last Friday the joint was packed with those who, back in the day, we used to call "blue hairs." Today, of course, it is the punkers with blue hair. Or green or purple.
So, the venue is casual, but it is also intimate. The performers generally seem easy with the crowd for these concerts, and such was the case with this jazz trio. The bass and keyboard players (Gonzalo Teppa and Victor Mestas) are from Venezuela. The violinist who leads the crew, Sandra Wong, introduced herself as a Chinese Jewish girl from Boulder. Teppa plucked the first line of "It's a Small World," to friendly laughter. There was a strong Latin influence in the jazz they played.
Wong played the violin exquisitely, but when she switched to Irish folk music she danced about like a leprechaun in what could only be described as frenzied fiddling, twirling, bouncing and stamping her feet.
She introduced us to her alternate instrument, a Swedish "nyckelharpa," which seemed a combination of a violin and guitar. Wong bows four strings and plays the frets on the other 12 strings for "sympathetic resonance." Its earliest known representation, she said, is of the nykelharpa being played by an angel in a stained glass window in an Italian church built in the early 1300s.
The Friday concerts are accompanied by an Art Show in the lobby before, and punch and cookies afterwards. This month's artist was the unsettling Thane Gorek, whose still lifes and landscapes made me think of the novelist Stephen King. The show notes call his work, "unusual." Interesting to look at, but I wouldn't want to bring one home. Halloween approacheth.