Klarinet Archive - Posting 000170.txt from 2000/11

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Soul horns and stolen instruments
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:11:16 -0500

At 08:38 AM 11/3/2000 -0500, David Hattner wrote:

>The reason I am so concerned is that this is a superb instrument that
>deserves to be owned, maintained and loved by a superb musician. One would
>assume that a buyer of this type of instrument would be someone very serious
>about music, such as a professional. I would not want one of my fellow
>professionals to pay good money for an instrument with a clouded history.
>That is a nightmare none of us would want to live through.
>
>The other reason is that I want to send a message to bottom feeders like Jim
>that getting involved with (stolen or likely stolen) musical instruments is a
>bad idea and causes nothing but trouble. This guy thinks that waiting out
>last week's outrage puts him in the clear, but he is wrong. His first auction
>brought bids of up to $2,500 quickly. So far, no bids at all on this auction.
>Let's keep sending this message.

I get superstitious about few things in life but musical instruments are on
my short list. My SO's son studied clarinet and saxophone for awhile with
some guys in Columbus, OH who had their supply of clarinets and saxes
ripped off from their studio. Some of them were their personal, high-end
instruments they used in their professional work (one of them was a weekend
sub with the Toledo Symphony). Eventually they were recovered by the cops
in places as diverse as Dayton and Toledo. The instruments were insured,
fortunately, but insurance rarely covers the full financial value and
certainly not the "heart value" of a brutalized instrument. The cops
offered the salvagable horns back to these men and they said they didn't
want them. "They've been violated, I won't play them" was their
comment. Okay, that is potentially a highly sexist comment especially in
the context of the issue of would a man want back a wife or SO who had been
subjected to rape "for real," but in the context of a musical instrument it
may be a different issue...someone indeed violated the horn, may have
misused it. Human beings can be led through love and care to recover from
hideous misuse and violation, but musical instruments, once they have had
the soul torn from them in the name of a quick-turnaround buck, cannot. I
don't know if David would even want to play the instruments that were taken
from him after this: God alone knows what journey they were on or who got
his or her greasy fingers and mouth on them, but in some way I feel as
though they have been diminished as means to express their owner's soul and
the soul of the music itself by what was done by those bastards who broke
into David's apartment.

Lenny Bruce used to have an old schtick about the junkie jazz musician
who'd smack-rap on about "Hey, maaaaan, I'm cooooool....I got Bird's
ax...." In truth, a lot of people probably had Charlie Parker's "ax" or
one of them, because Parker regularly hocked one of his altos in the 8th
Avenue pawnshops in the name of the next nickel bag. In some part of me, I
believe--weirdo that I am--that something diminishes or goes out of an
instrument when it's sold for illegimate purposes, when its owner sells it
to support his addiction...or as we've seen with David Hattner's bass
clarinet, when some infrahuman slug steals it and it turns up on a
glom-board like eBay, the ultimate yard sale.

Ken

----------------------------
Kenneth Wolman http://www.rio-cardoner.com
and http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder.tcl?folder_id=49340
"...perhaps we really complete those we love, fulfill their finally
unchanging essence, when they're gone from us, when we take into ourselves
their portions of them still available to us, to acknowledge them more
perfectly, more purely, and do homage to the fugitive, protean forms of
love of, and love from."--C.K. Williams, "Misgivings"

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