last scene

A small, upsetting loss for art and America. Giardinelli’s is gone and it isn’t coming back. We’re talking jazz, classical, show music –  a mecca for brass musicians. I found out this morning that the old Giardinelli instrument shop in downtown New York, started in 1947 by an Italian immigrant, is no longer there.  The name lives on as a catalogue. Giardinelli’s was the place to go if you were a horn player. They sold and repaired trumpets, trombones, saxophones – horns --  and even manufactured their own mouthpieces, of which I bought two. Both times I went there I was with my grandmother, who was very patient amidst all the trumpets and trombones hanging in her hair. We’d taken the Staten Island ferry over, and to her, Giardinellis must have been stranger than the Bronx Zoo. The guys coming in and out to pick up trumpets or to test horns or mouthpieces in dingy practice rooms represented Vegas, Broadway, everywhere around New York, touring band members (Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, etc) as well as unknown guys like me. Who was i? I was a high school junior who had already played with Miles Davis and had received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music. I was a nobody among these guys, but I was a comer and when I got into a practice room, they knew it. Of course, these other cats were blowing the walls down back there. Fuck! I never felt more at home in any other shop. Grandma came into the small room with me while I tested mouthpieces. The guy at the counter accommodated me with different mouthpieces and different mouthpiece parts. I tried many combinations, back and forth between the guy at the front counter and the practice room with grandma. She listened and watched for a diagnosis. The store’s philosophy was pretty laid back, but the guys behind the counter were serious. I remember just a couple years ago, GiardinellI had a website for their store, but yesterday I couldn’t find it. I was thinking of bringing my horn in because I trusted them. I wanted to play again. All I could find was a GiardinellI on-line catalogue, which I was already aware of. GiardinellI was now making it’s own instruments and they were hooked up with musician’s friend, the largest on-line musical instrument store. I wrote to them and asked if they still had the store in New York. A guy wrote back and said no, they no longer have any stores. Those dingy practice rooms are probably being rented out as apartments. If I had been more tuned like a writer back then, I could describe the place better. I remember the smell of the soldering, of the burning flux, the smell of valve and slide oil. A variety of men came in, from black suits and cologne to t-shirts and faded jeans, some talk. They talked about their gigs, the scene. I remember thinking the Broadway guys had it made, but I could never sit like that now, playing the same thing every night for 20 years. Anyhow, this is 23 years ago, when I learned Giardinelli’s was the best place in the world. My grandmother is now in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. Life goes on and there are things you will never do again.