Harmony Close at Hand

Musicians make music to fill a need. To create a sound that is not already there, to capture a feeling, to move hearts, minds and bodies. But first comes the instrument, and the instrument maker. As it turns out, they work to fill the same need and more: to preserve a tradition, to teach, to perfect the harmony of tool, process and result.

Such is the premise of “Heart and Hands,” a photographic tour through an American universe of instrument makers by Jake Jacobson. Irked by what he considered an unfair European assumption that there was no real instrument craftsmanship this side of the Atlantic, Jacobson set out to find and record our vast and diverse culture of musical artisans. From Alabama to Wisconsin, Jacobson turned up makers of every kind of sound-making device: stringed, reed and wind instruments, keyboards and drums, instruments of brass and steel, every kind of wood, and bamboo and gourd. He visited factories, studios, vocational facilities, even prisons, capturing 250 people of all ages, colors and regions, bound by just one thing: They make the things that make the music.

The result is a book of photographs and brief quotes that eloquently testify to the idiosyncrasy and devotion of a handmade American subculture. A traveling exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute that begins in Washington in April 2000 will carry the message as well.

A native of Los Angeles, Jacobson began his love affair with music early. He studied saxophone and clarinet (he still plays sax daily), with a teacher named Glen Johnston. The time he spent in Johnston’s Studio City studio, where Johnston also rebuilt and repaired instruments, was Jacobson’s first inspiration.

“I did this in honor of Glen,” Jacobson says.

Although he now lives in Telluride, Colo., Jacobson has many ties to his hometown. He owns the Larchmont Yoga Center, for one thing, and his mother lives in Los Feliz. “I think it’s the greatest place in the world,” he says, rattling off his L.A. pedigree. “I was born in East L.A.--my mother went to Lincoln High. My father went to USC. I grew up in Silver Lake and went to Marshall [High]. I still love the neighborhood, it’s really a community.”

So it’s not surprising that the city is well-represented in his book. Broken into sections by geography--the Gulf states, Appalachia, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West--”Heart and Hands” features more than half a dozen Southern California artisans. Their work and personal histories reflect the city’s endless permutations of diversity, and the similarities of their craft.

All are musicians who turned to instrument making to create what they could not otherwise find; who carry on work their fathers, or brothers, or friends taught them; who feel a need to pass it on to the next generation. And most of them have one more thing in common: The art chose them.

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“Most instrument makers did not dream of this being their work as youngsters,” says John Zehnder, a fifth-generation Angeleno and a maker and restorer of banjos, guitars and other stringed instruments.

Still, with his long white beard, long pale fingers and wire-frame specs, Zehnder, 60, seems perfectly cast in his role of musical craftsman. But even for him, it was an avocation he “just came to, one way or another.”

It all started, he says, when he was 9 and his parents gave him a ukulele.

“The wonderful thing about the ukulele,” he says, “is that it’s unpretentious. People think it’s a toy and then are surprised that it plays real music.”

But Zehnder wasn’t content to limit himself to the music of the uke.

“When the folk boom hit,” he says, “I wanted to learn banjo. But I’m left-handed, and there aren’t a lot of left-handed banjos around. So I built one.

“At first I only built out of necessity,” he adds. “I converted my little guitar to a 12-string just so I could play ‘Walk Right In,’ which was popular at the time.”

He got some help from the staff of McCabe’s, the Santa Monica club-cum-guitar store that is ground zero for all things folk. As he pursued a career in the ministry, events conspired to create a parallel career as well. While attending Yale Divinity School, he became friends with an antique dealer who taught him how to restore older instruments. So when he returned to Los Angeles, it seemed natural he would check back in at McCabe’s.

Now director of the music school and chief acoustic repairman at McCabe’s, Zehnder restores all things stringed, teaches people how to play them and, when he has time, makes banjos--his specialty. The most recent was a customized invention.

“It has a mandolin body with a banjo neck,” Zehnder says, “so it has a clearer, almost dulcimer sound.”

He has plans one day to make a straight-ahead mandolin, but he’s still waiting for the wood to age. “I got it about 15 years ago,” he says with a bit of a laugh. “Some makers won’t use wood until it’s 20, 40 years old. I figure I’ve got about five more years.”

Making a banjo, he says, takes about three months; the mandolin will take quite a bit more because the wood must be steamed and bent, then carved in the back, like a violin. But Zehnder is a patient man; he recently finished a two-year restoration of a bouzouki, a Greek stringed instrument, for the Greek Heritage Foundation.

“It was literally a priceless instrument, from the ‘40s, and when I finally heard it played, and the people couldn’t tell the difference between the parts that had been there and those I had replaced, I figure I did a pretty good job.”

It is this sense of completion that separates the satisfactions of instrument making from those of playing.

“It’s interesting,” he says, “a lot of builders are not virtuoso players. Their artistry has to do with the form they’re creating. Performance is fleeting, but when you build, you have this work of art.”

In addition to making, repairing, teaching and playing, Zehnder is a minister at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in west L.A. and moonlights as a marriage and family counselor. If it sounds like a busy way of life, it is, but all the threads, especially the music, weave together in the end.

“I do some preaching,” he says, “but I also play a lot of music in the church--bass, banjo, mandolin, whatever they want.”

As his parents did, he has passed the music on to one of his twin sons, who formed the rock band named Zehnder. The other son also makes music, millennium-style; he’s a song composer for a software company and recently recruited his entire family, including his dad, to record a song on grammatical concepts.

“Music is a great tool for teaching,” says Zehnder, of the latest twist his musical career has taken. “It sits in the brain a little deeper than words.”

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That is a sentiment Rasheed Ali completely gets behind. Gets behind and pounds on. Five years ago, Ali, a longtime professional keyboardist, agreed to do a little teaching, bringing music appreciation into the Eagle Rock Montessori school his two sons attended. He quickly discovered that rather than lacking appreciation, the kids lacked instruments, so he hauled in a few coffee cans and showed them how to make drums.

“I’d grown up listening to my brothers play the drums,” he says. “And my dad had made me flutes out of bamboo. I realized people had always been using what they found in the environment to make instruments. I was just using urban things. Everyone can find a coffee can.”

He liked teaching so much it became a running gig--in local schools, at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts--and he went through a lot of coffee cans. After about a year, a friend gave him some gourds to use, but he says they just sat around his apartment, at first. Then one day, inspired by research into traditional gourd drums from West Africa, he picked one up and made a drum.

“It was like a drug,” he says, laughing. “I couldn’t stop. I have like 200 drums in my apartment.”

Big drums and little drums, plain drums and fancy drums, drums of every color and shape, each of them with a different sound, a different timbre, each of them a product of much trial and error.

“This was not an intellectual pursuit,” says Ali, 45. “I didn’t want to read a book on the mechanics of drum making. I’m a visual learner, so I just studied successful drums. At the L.A. Craft and Folk Museum, for example, they have drums you can look at and play, and I would see how they were put together. The most complicated thing was the lacing, but a lot of it is common sense.”

He also drew on his own familial heritage.

“My family is from the Caribbean,” he says, “and they use cowrie shells in ritual there, so I use a lot of cowrie shells. Some I carve, some I stain. I really try to blend the art with the music. At first, as a musician, I was trying to make the perfect drum. Then I started getting into the art.”

In the end, however, they are meant to be played. Now part of a band called Rain People, Ali has added percussion--on his own drums--to his keyboard work. The drums fit well with the group’s progressive jazz, but, he says, they really lend themselves to more traditional African music.

“In Africa it is said that instruments can only play in their own tongue,” Ali says. “Maybe it’s because of the materials, because there is no plastic or fiberglass, but these drums sound like what they are. Traditional.”

They will also be part of “Rhythms of the Soul: African Instruments in the Diaspora” a three-venue exhibition opening Oct. 16 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the California African-American Museum and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Ali’s drums will be at the African American museum, and so will he; in addition to performing, he plans to do drum-making workshops during the exhibition.

Because as much as he loves his drums--and he loves his drums--he loves the kids more.

“I remember, when I was a kid, the day the teacher asked us what instrument we wanted to play. They don’t do that anymore, and that is so sad,” he says. “Kids are uncoordinated around instruments because they have had no contact with them. And when they make their own,” he says with a laugh, “you should see how they guard them, and how often they play them.”

His own sons, Kareem and Rohan, now 8 and 10, are becoming quite accomplished music makers--they joined their father at last year’s drum festival at the Pacific Asia Museum.

“For me it’s meditative,” he says. “It’s spiritual. When I make my drums and when I play them, I felt as if I were channeling some ancient spirit. It sounds New Age-y, but I really feel a connection with my ancestors.”

*

Music is a keystone of ritual and tradition and community. For the instrument makers, that community can be as small as the family, or as large as the world.

George Abe’s (pronounced AH-bay) uncle was blind and, following a Japanese tradition, played the lute-like biwa. He taught his younger brother, Abe’s father, to play, and in 1928 the two of them came to the United States and spent two years touring the country, seeking out Japanese communities, and playing their music.

“They were basically minstrels,” Abe says. “They carried news from community to community. It was amazing. They spoke no English, but my father said everyone was very friendly.”

His opinion was a bit optimistic; Abe’s father was one of thousands of Japanese sent to internment camps during World War II. In the camp at Manzanar, he met Abe’s mother, a poet.

With a family history like that, it’s no wonder Abe grew up musical, beginning with the bamboo flute before moving on to the taiko drums he currently makes and plays for the Senshin Buddhist Temple in East Los Angeles. “Taiko” is Japanese for “important drum,” and the instruments were traditionally used in religious rituals, as “sympathetic magic,” Abe says. “To guarantee a good harvest, to bring rain.”

In Japan, the drums are made from a single piece of ash, and considering that the drums can be 4 or 5 feet in diameter, that means finding a big tree, which has become increasingly difficult. A traditionally made taiko drum can now cost as much as $30,000.

So when Abe’s drumming group Kinnara Taiko was forming in the early ‘70s, they realized that they were going to have to find a different way to make the drums.

“We came up with a Japanese American solution,” Abe, 55, says.

Using wine barrels, which they took apart and reconfigured, Abe and his group, among the first taiko drummers in this country, re-created the drum in a way that was musically satisfying and affordable.

Abe has also tinkered a bit with traditional flute making. “When I went to Japan years ago,” he says, “I got a real bamboo flute. It cost $500. They are not chromatic [they have no flats or sharps], so if you want [a complete sound and] to play with other musicians, you need about 14 flutes. So we started making them out of American bamboo.”

A friend in Silver Lake donates the bamboo from his yard, and Abe experiments with finishes. “It is obviously not Japanese bamboo,” he says. “It sounds different. Seems a bit more laid-back and softer, which seems right. Whenever I am next to a Japanese player, he will be very envious.”

Abe makes his living playing and teaching, often with the group Japanese Festival Sounds, which goes into schools and demonstrates taiko drumming. Kinnara Taiko also performs at festivals and ceremonies. At a recent Taiko festival downtown, Abe taught a workshop in drum playing.

“When we started in the ‘70s, there was one group here, one in San Francisco,” Abe says. “Now there are more than 150 groups all around the country. There is a lot of crossover--some Korean, some Chinese, some Anglo. People get turned on by the music and the energy of a group.”

The increasing popularity of taiko drumming increases the demand for Abe’s instruments, but almost all of his output goes to the temple. “I do not do it for the money,” he says. “Music has been a very large part of my life; the drums are my contribution to the group.”