Quiet weekend in Uppland

Mostly quiet around here for the weekend, just a couple of nice concerts to spice things up. Plus some homework, some tunes, I started reading my Pooh book in Swedish,…

This weekend the distanskurs class was back, so there was a short concert for them (and us) here on Saturday evening with Bosse Larsson and Anders Liljefors, two of the eminent tradition-bearers of Uppland. Anders is old enough that he’s getting shaky, and says he’s playing fiddle now in preference to nyckelharpa because it works better with shaky hands, and did anyone want to buy his nice nyckelharpa? After the concert, their schedule said there’d be jamming, so four of us tried starting up a session in the main hall and trying to look inviting. Evidently most of them thought it’d be more fun to play with their own classmates, but we did catch two and we had a nice session with them.

Sunday afternoon I met up with Andrea and Matthias in Uppsala — first successfully discharging my “buy black leggings” errand between train and bus times — and we went to hear ESI’s exec director Maria in her other role, with her band Jidder, which plays music from Skåne (southernmost Sweden). The venue, Kulturoasen, is a sort of coffeehouse setup in the courtyard of a natural foods store affiliated with the Waldorf school, so a “lunch concert” also featured yummy root-vegetable soup. The show felt brief at a single hour-long set, but we enjoyed it very much.