Klarinet Archive - Posting 000261.txt from 2000/11

From: Gary Truesdail <gir@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Soul horns and stolen instruments
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 22:16:43 -0500

Well said!!!

Kenneth Wolman wrote:

> 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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