I knew it would be an impressive crowd Friday night for the Fresno Philharmonic's inaugural pops concert at Woodward Park the moment I got off on the Highway 41 Friant Road exit. It was about half an hour before the concert began, and the line of cars waiting to get into the park nearly stretched to the freeway. The concert ended up starting 20 minutes late just so people could park and get to their seats.

And what did they find when they got there? An absolutely perfect evening, temperature-wise, and a pretty fun musical one as well with guest artists Sons of the San Joaquin. With their booming cowboy-song voices and laidback, get-along-little-doggies charm, The Sons know how to smooth their way into the hearts of a crowd. And it was pretty obvious that this partisan turnout included many of their fans. Adding to the mix was the superb Rich O'Brien on guitar, Richard Chon on fiddle and Ray Appleton on guitar/harmonica.

I'm just so impressed with the richness of the band's sound, and particularly the character-drenched voices of lead singers Jack and Joe Hannah. When Jack Hannah sings about the loneliness of the frontier and the solitary life of the cowboy, his deep voice evokes a wide open sky with millions of stars -- and a melancholy young man looking up at them.

In terms of the orchestral accompaniment, I liked this high-concept performance better than the Beatles concert earlier this season, when the orchestra was mostly overpowered by the amplified sound of the guest artists. In arrangements of such Sons songs as "Way Out There," the orchestra was used to strong effect. There were moments when the strings soared and the brass flared in a way that added a whole new depth to familiar music. When principal oboist Jose Diaz played the theme to "Shenendoah," the winsome sound brought tears to my eyes.

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES: Sometimes art feels as contemporary as a news Web site. That's the way I felt when I walked into Corridor 2122 last week to look at its current group members' show and saw a charcoal drawing by Stephen Dent hanging on the wall.

Titled "Aircraft Study," the work is sketched over a printed world map -- the colorful, cheap kind that you'd find in a National Geographic or hanging in a school classroom. Dent has sketched out the blunt outline of an airplane.

The fuselage is mostly depicted with darker charcoal strokes. He's left part of the original map uncovered in a use of negative space that helps define the shape of the airplane and what could be a runway. Here's the weird thing: the one unadulterated part of the original map just happens to be the stretch of ocean between South America and Europe into which Air France Flight 447 plunged last week. Up until that air crash, I'd only heard vaguely about the perilous "Horse Latitudes," but with the news story being so fresh in my mind, I immediately made the leap. To me, the thick scrawl of the charcoal seemed ominous, and I could imagine the plane going down.