News-Record.com

We spent a long weekend in the hills with a couple of very good friends who have retreated to a blissful retirement in Black Mounrtain. Lucky ducks.

Among the highlights of the trip were a Saturday afternoon in downtown Asheville, where the energy and activity are so palpable you can almost touch them. There are shops and restaurants and enough eclectic, historic architecture to make your head spin.

Or you can just watch the people, who are a show in and of themselves.

Greensboro ought to take notes.

Saturday evening we wound up on the rolling campus of Warren Wilson College, where students raise cows and tend fields between classes.

There we stumbled onto a Black Mozart concert by Futureman of Bella Fleck and the Flecktones fame.

The concert was a tribute to an undersung black French composer and violinist, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

They should make a movie about Saint-Georges (1745-1799), who pioneered the writing of music for string quartets. He was also France's best fencer and fought heroically in the French Revolution.

Saturday night's concert combined classical, blues, jazz, rock and rap ... well, you had to be there.

And boy was there plenty of there there.

Here we were, sitting in a church across a country road from cows and pastures and cornfields and silos, listening to a black drummer conduct two violinists, a cellist and a banjo player in a roomful of college students with blue hair and tattoos.

Is this a great country or what?