He stares serenely into the crowd of seniors here in Salt Lake City's Silverado Senior Living Center, where his wife works and where he plays a weekly gig. Garcia, 60, a trim man with gray hair, wears a cream-colored traditional "liki-liki" suit, topped by a jacket fastened with gold buttons and adorned with a stand-up collar. He's been playing the folk harp, a smaller version of the classic-stringed instrument with a chamber that provides a distinctive percussive sound, since he was 13.
Several songs into the set, Garcia will be joined by three other members of Venezuelan Cantando, the name of the band a nod to the simple joy of singing. The family band is led by nephew Asdrubal "Drew" Garcia, 44, who learned to play the "cuatro," a four-stringed instrument that's bigger than a ukulele and smaller than a guitar, from his uncle as a boy back in their hometown of Barquisimeto.
They're joined by Carlos' son, Carlos Jr., 28, who sings and plays electric bass, and friend Jose Criollo Jr., 35, who plays bongos and maracas. The younger men also play around town in other Latin bands, such as Salsa Brava, Mambo Jumbo and Orquesta Latino.
The Salt Lake band is devoted to preserving the distinctive percussive-string folk music that is rooted in the Lara region of central Venezuela. For Utah festival performances, such as Living Traditions and the Hispanic American Festival, the band's music is punctuated by the vocals of Asdrubal Garcia's wife, Gisela, and dances performed by their daughters, Vanessa, 19, and Valeria, 17.
The girls wear simple costumes, white peasant blouses and flounced royal blue and red cotton skirts, accented by a yellow flower tucked into their ponytails, all colors drawn from the Venezuelan flag. "It's a folk dance, like a waltz, with a little step," he explains. "They have to do the step to sound like a rhythm."
One distinctive genre of Venezuelan music is the "joropo," fast-moving, triple-meter songs based on a chord cycle that's repeated over and over. "It's not mariachi, not merengue, not samba; it's Venezuelan," says Asdrubal Garcia, who in his day job oversees cross-cultural outreach programs for the Boy Scouts.
Venezuelan musicians borrowed and adapted the harp from colonial Spain, then added sounds influenced by Caribbean and African rhythms, Craig Miller, folk-arts coordinator of the Utah Arts Council, says of the Garcias' brand of Venezuelan music. "To have that classical instrument, like the harp, used in the music gives it a subtlety," he says.
One layer of the music's percussive sound is created by plucking and striking the two distinctive stringed instruments, says Dan Sheehy, director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the nonprofit record label of the national museum. The folk harp has shorter strings than the classical instrument, so there's a faster decay to the vibrating sounds. Then there's the loose tension of the cuatro's strings, which allows players to stop the strings with both downward and upward strums.
"It's really engaging music," Sheehy says. "Listen for really cool-sounding effects and rhythms. There are a lot of minor chords in the music from the plains region, which has a really cool dark sound to it."
Native groups who play authentic music are common in cities such as Miami and New York City, home to large populations of Venezuelans, but rare in other regions of the country, such as Utah, where only several thousand Venezuelan immigrants live. "It's one of the most exciting, engaging, expressive, obviously extroverted forms of music in Latin America," he says. "It makes people move and just listen really closely. It just reaches out and grabs you."
Sheehy says a group marked by a masterful folk harp player such as Carlos Garcia should be considered a "national cultural asset. I only know two or three in the whole United States," he says.
Carlos Garcia's story is almost as interesting as the music, which during this performance prompts care-center workers to dance in the aisles and guide shuffling residents through salsa steps.
Garcia, who understands more English then he speaks, listens as his nephew explains how he taught himself to play the harp as a teenager. Garcia and his older brother fell in love with the sound of the instrument, but their father forbade lessons, because he didn't want them to fall into the itinerant lives of musicians. Instead, the brothers made their own harp out of a cabinet on the sly, and become so proficient on the homemade instrument they were invited to play on a local radio station.
At first, they wouldn't allow their names to be used on the air. Later, the local music academy donated an instrument to the brothers, and they continued to play at family and community gatherings. Their father was happy that the music became a hobby, not their livelihood.
In this country, a folk harp is likely to cost about $400, more than double the cost in Venezuela. The group owns two, both of which have interesting histories. One was shipped into the country by military transport, thanks to a pilot friend with connections at Hill Air Force Base. The Garcias acquired their second instrument after a famous Venezuelan singer performed in Utah. The singer decided to sell his harp when he determined that he could buy two for the price of what it would cost to ship the instrument home.
The story of the Garcia family band began more than a decade ago, when Asdrubal Garcia was taking English classes at Salt Lake Community College. He hooked up with a relative to play a duet on the cuatro and mandola for a Latino cultural festival. The group acquired a name and began playing regularly around town and at festivals after Carlos Garcia and his son moved to Salt Lake City.
None of the group reads music, so the musicians learn new songs by listening to CDs or picking out melodies and rhythms on the piano. To please an audience of Utahns on a recent Sunday afternoon, their set mixes a sampling of Latin-accented hymns, a Venezuelan cover of the Mexican "La Bamba," even Lawrence Welk songs.
"When we are in a festival, we play Colombian, Mexican, South and Central American music," Asdrubal Garcia says. "All that music together, it's like a potpourri, a potpourri of South America."
American listeners seem fascinated by the sound of the folk harp, Asdrubal Garcia says, and his bandmates nod in agreement. "When we play in festivals, some Venezuelan people love it and some cry when we play. The sounds remind them of home."
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Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
Part of an occasional series on folk artists in Utah. To hear an audio clip of Venezuelan Cantando, visit http://www.sltrib.com.
