AWBMUSIC Blog

It’s January. The sun is filtering through the high, cold clouds and the cold sneaks in under the kitchen door. I just worked out from under a mountain of papers I’ve been “saving” for just such a lull as this past week. Many are now in the file cabinet, but most are thankfully filed where I will never have to think of them again.

It was a fun trip to old Vienna for New Year’s Eve. I’ve recounted bits of the story so often now that I’m tired of it, but I will say it was a great recharge- of my outlook, physical energy and most of all, with music. To fly over the ocean, pick up an instrument or three and play with dear friends from long ago, with style, I might add, boosted my ego and gave me a reason to count myself among the living again. Since then, I’ve had a few jam sessions of renewed joy with the gang from Calvert Hills and, of course, Brulee. I also started teaching again, now at Winterhalter Music in Bethesda. I was recruited by email in December, even as I was applying for other crazy jobs to make ends meet like as an archaeology lab tech or the recycling coordinator at the University of Maryland. Cassie and her team seem well organized and, in the words of my venerable colleague there, Paul Langosh, that they’re in it for the right reasons.

We finally leased our Ellicott City house. I had real trouble finding the right folks in spite of the 100-hundred-plus inquiries. In the end I had to choose between a business man who needed to rent a second home near his favorite golf course and a family of five that wants to upgrade from an apartment. What a choice!! Suffice it to say that I feel great about the choice Beth and I made.

Oh, and I bought this last week…

Another year for me today. German friends have pointed out that this is actually the fifty-third year, and I am only looking back on fifty-two. Too technical for me.

I wrote a long letter to my former bass professor, Josef Niederhammer in Stockerau, Austria, offering some kind of retrospective on my music career years later and the role he played in it. It was fun to look back at those details of a very intense time of life, from 1991-2004 in Vienna. I would summarize by saying I have profound gratitude for the opportunities I had to be in a new place for those formative years. Andreas Haidu once said, “In Vienna I feel I live in every century but the present one!” I think that feeling has changed since I left, with the burgeoning population growth (mostly immigrants), hyper-modern buildings and infrastructure. In any case, the town leaped from the 19th to the 21st Century within the time I was there, it felt like. I have yet to send the letter.

Pictured is the geodesic dome Beth and I purchased along with five acres in West Virginia in Fall. I spent from September to December stripping the inside and outside, making repairs to the structure, and (mostly) enjoying many days of quiet and solitude, camping in a 2018 Apex Nano in the driveway. Life on the mountain suits me, though I wish now I could have spent more time at home then. It’s buttoned up for the winter and I am looking forward to getting back to work with the windows, roofing and interior as soon as we get our rhythm again, and the weather cooperates.

August finds your host simmering in Maryland, stewing in a pot of errands and duties that in themselves are manageable, but as a whole are discouraging and overwhelming. It could be withdrawal from our two-week road trip to as far as Wyoming. Yeah, we saw some stuff.

March 2020 finds your host happily busy back in the shop. There is only so much toilet repair (Fall 2019) that an artist can take! Several weeks’ work in January transformed the choked-off sounding and pale Nr 3 Bajoni 44″ model. Now the Italian poplar and spruce bass is a great sounding and playing bass, though it’s still pale.

The work was performed in several stages. 1) Open, regraduate to uniform and less bulky thicknesses, close. New soundpost. 2) Open, slim down the existing bass bar in width and height, close. 3) Open, remove the bass bar, trim and refit it at the 3/7 location called for in Sacconi’s book, close. 4) Plane fingerboard with the help of Joey Naeger’s complex geometry guidelines. 5) New bridge and soundpost. 6) Adjustment with my friend and colleague John Lemoine lining up everything to the mm. All of this work was documented for a forthcoming scientific paper on impulse response measurements I made during the process. Look for this work at the 2021 ISB in Lincoln, Nebraska.

It’s a really nice instrument now, and I’m using it for gigs. The main ingredient that was missing the first time around was time. I was rushed to get the thing done in time for the 2019 ISB meeting in June, and the oil varnish takes a long time to cure. the second ingredient was perhaps overconfidence, since the thickness of the plates was honestly sloppy. No longer…

Now that Nr 3 is an enjoyable bass, I had time to go back to Nr 2. It’s also a 44″ Bajoni model, but with European flamed maple and the same Italian spruce. From the moment I first strung it up it has been a cannon of an instrument and I have used it constantly since then for almost all of my shows.

I cleaned up much of the intentionally rough scroll- and top-work, which the 2017 ISB judges criticized quite a bit, with a sharp scraper and removed the varnish with a lot of denatured alcohol. Like all my varnish, I made the original shellac and alcohol finish from scratch. There are a few qualities about that varnish I liked. It was tough, went on evenly and had the right plasticity, but it wasn’t very transparent. For years I’ve referred to its hue as “urine-colored,” so it was about time to change that. I’m now putting the finishing touches on the new mahogany-colored spirit varnish, also made with nothing but natural siam seedlac, elemi, sandarac and Everclear alcohol, and a top caot of dewaxed transparent shellac. This instrument will soon be for sale, so stay tuned!

September 2018 finds your host astounded by the passage of time.

Highlights of the past months include:  Getting a good start on basses number 3 & 4, Flying to Vienna for three reunion concerts with Salonorchester Alhambra, playing 20′ and 30’s music with some really great musicians, visiting Verona, Brixen, Cremona, Perugia and Rome in June and July, meeting great bass makers like Tetsu Suzuki and Edgar Russ in Cremona and David Wiebe in Woodstock, NY, attending family Camp Ohana in Fairlee, VT with the fam, Katie starting the fourth grade of a great new school year, and meeting my dad and Dennis Stark in NYC last weekend.

I am currently holding down the fort while Beth is away for a conference, tending to errands, playing with my 1989 Toro Key-Lectric mower I found in the trash, and working a few hours a day in the shop. We are also struggling with the loss of our friend, K., who tragically died while on post with the US Embassy in Madagascar last Friday. RIP.

I struggle with my multiple identities often, but am feeling really great about my abilities at the moment. I love fixing old stuff. The Toro started right up as I tested it today, but then made a funny noise and lost power- either the one push rod got thrown again, or more likely there’s a problem with the governor assembly which is killing the throttle. I am a little tired of taking it apart more than once, but man, it’s a nice machine and it was a big mess when I picked it up. Key start and self propelled…

I also got the screenplay draft of a film project yesterday in which I will appear. Weird. My good friend, Ludwig Wüst in Vienna, makes about a film a year and appears regularly on the European independent festivals. Since he works with amateur actors, I should fit right in. I sent him ten minutes of footage years ago at his request. I just did one take of improvised dialogue at his sparse direction: “Just explain to your mother why you haven’t been in touch for so long.” That’s what I did, and it was used and credited in “Heimatfilm” 2016. Now it looks like a major commitment of time and effort is in the works for “Erde” (“Soil”), where I will play opposite the lead female as the foreign visitor. The film is currently planned for release in 2020.