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I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water. ~ Ray Charles When I was returning to music after a 30-year hiatus, I used the Community Band and Orchestra Contact list to identify the many, many community bands in the Seattle and surrounding area. Most of the community bands at the time had either no Web presence, or a limited Web page that...

The Story Since the beginning of Quinn the Eskimo, certainly well before breaking into the new band instrument market, we have dealt with vintage instruments. On a quest for world domination, “Supreme Commander” Matt Stoecker has scoured the country in whatever form he could, trying to unearth the most intriguing band instruments in the world, or simply those that had died long ago, but had the potential to be something more after being passed on to either myself, or our senior tech, Brad Wherry. As such, many of the instruments we get into our shop are not what might be considered...

This striking Pan American “Violin Finish” clarinet (made by Conn) was mistakenly described on eBay as made from pear wood. It is more commonly known as a propeller wood clarinet. This particular instrument was dirt cheap and at this point unplayable without an overhaul. This instrument was an ingenious solution by Conn to the scarcity of Granadilla wood during the Second World War. Unsubstantiated sources say the same wood was used in the manufacture of WWII B24 Liberator Bomber Propellers’, hence the nick name; “Propeller wood clarinet”. That has since be debunked. They came in plastic or Cocobolo plywood. Bill Hausmann sez...

Meet my little friend, the Keilwerth Toneking 3000 Jazzophone. This was the eBay write-up by QuinnTheEskimo (aka Matt) who is perhaps the world's finest at finding unique and playable vintage music instruments: “This is an EXTREMELY RARE Keilwerth Toneking 3000 Jazzophone. The jazzophone is a bit of an odd duck-it’s a trumpet but is wrapped like a saxophone. Looks really funky and cool and sounds great, though you can’t use mutes with it. In over 10 years of dealing in vintage instruments I’ve never seen another one of these in person.” In a recent email Gerhard Julius Keilwerth sez of...

Taken from the Woodwind forum where my friend and admin Pete contributed to this. A few days ago, I came across a couple of saxophones that I had never seen or heard of before and they looked really, really interesting:https://www.acimv.fr/nouvelles-news/instruments-volés-stolen-instruments/ (really big pics)’’     I had heard of the Romero System before, but only on clarinets. Then I looked back to see where I heard of them from. Hey, it’s Gandalfe’s website. However, the article was written by Terry Stibal (SOTSDO), a gentleman who was a clarinet Content Expert here until he passed away in 2015. I thought the keywork was extremely interesting...