Late to the party and not in the market for socks...just a word about violins.
There is (or was) a wonderful American duo called Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. Tracy's still around; Dave died suddenly a few years ago.
I was fortunate enough to get to interview him, and he talked about Tracy's violin:
“Her violin is over 200 years old,” Carter mused, “and it was smashed at one time and put back together. And there’s a sadness and sorrow and pain and depth of knowledge and sensibility to Tracy’s playing and to the sound that comes out of that violin. And that’s because the violin itself has gone through death and resurrection. And there’s a wisdom there in that all the pain and sensitivity Tracy carries; there’s a resonance between that and the violin that she plays such that she gets this amazing variety of heartrending tone out of the thing. I really think there’s nobody else like her in the world.”
It was the first time I'd heard someone else talk about the magic in a violin (well, if you don't count Charlie Daniels in "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"!)...but not the first time I'd heard magic *from* a violin.
There is something sort of scary about them, or something unearthly.
Swarb, I just wonder how often you had to clean the ashes out of them back in your smoking days.
