The "E" word no part-time brass player wants to hear when he's just busted his chops by playing for the first time in 12 months.

Also the title of an article in yesterday's paper I thought was very interesting:

ENCORE

 

Fragile combinations of wood and steel, many stringed instruments were left swollen and unplayable after stewing in Katrina's floodwaters. But many of these scarred survivors are being painstakingly restored to make music once more.

 

Monday, January 14, 2008

 

By Mark Waller

 

The musician and the master repairman examined the tattered electric guitar, its neck separated from its body, its finish faded and its wiring corroded.

 

"I hope you like gray inlay, because that's what it's going to look like," Sal Giardina told his customer, guitarist Perrin Isaac, after wiping down the decorative plastic plates on the neck of the Gibson Les Paul.

 

The inlay used to be pearly, but something in Hurricane Katrina's floodwater, something more sinister even than an onstage rock 'n' roll guitar-smashing rampage, turned it permanently dark. That doesn't bother Isaac, who had several instruments submerged when the levee broke near his Lakeview apartment.

 

"I'm cool if you leave the staining," Isaac said, figuring it would add character to the instrument his parents gave him as a high school graduation gift in 1977. "I'd like to leave some of the scarring on them just as a reminder of what happened."

 

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to reverberate even in the timeless, tucked-away shop where Giardina works as a luthier -- someone who builds and restores stringed instruments -- and where he expects to continue rehabilitating storm-sullied instruments for at least a few more years. Other luthiers in the New Orleans area also reported a hurricane-fueled spike in business.

 

Giardina has taken in about 20 swamped instruments. Repairs can take a long time, partly because the instruments need a long time to dry out and partly because Giardina seems to operate on the pace of a different era.

 

"I work like an artist," Giardina said in his shop at Focis Street and Metairie Road in Old Metairie, where a thicket of hanging tools and instruments covers the walls and glue cooks on a miniature stove. "I really have no sense of time."

 

His longtime customers know this and accept it.

 

"I mean this in a good way: Sal will take his time getting a guitar together," Isaac said. "It feels like you're in old-time Italy, walking into his shop. It's always wood shavings all over the floor. Sal's always covered in sawdust. You always have great conversations in there with all the local guys getting their things fixed."

 

Storm casualties

 

Water damage presents an unusual challenge in instrument repair, said Tim Olsen of the Guild of American Luthiers in Tacoma, Wash. Olsen is the founding editor of the guild's magazine, American Lutherie.

 

The most common threat to stringed instruments is people sitting on them, Olsen said. Other frequent dangers include leaving instruments to bake in hot cars, which loosens the glue, and splintering them in car accidents.

 

But in the early months after the storm at their shop in Folsom, luthiers Joe Manuel and Phil Patterson saw instruments with flood damage coming in from Slidell, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. They're still working on three of them.

 

Covington luthier Jimmy Foster said he received inquiries from more than 100 people, many whose instruments he eventually deemed beyond repair.

 

It was damage unlike anything Foster had seen in three decades of lutherie. Corrosion ate metal strings and screws. Wooden bodies warped in the steam room-like conditions, even on instruments stored above the water's reach.

 

"That's the first time I've ever seen strings just disintegrate," Foster said. "I guess it was just so humid, and the water was so salty."

 

The luthiers' guild has 11 members in Louisiana, including some who relayed harrowing stories to the group about the 2005 hurricanes, Olsen said. Olsen estimates that about 1,000 full-time luthiers are at work in the United States.

 

Lutherie is a growing field, he said, because appreciation for hand-crafted instruments is in vogue. The trade nearly disappeared from the country in the mid-20th century when popular sentiment preferred mass production.

 

A new golden age

 

"That was not a crafty time," Olsen said. "It was a taking-care-of-business kind of time."

 

"We're now in the golden age of this stuff," he said, led by a group of baby boomers who taught themselves the craft in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Michael McGee, a systems analyst who lives in Metairie, practices lutherie as a hobby out of his home shop. McGee grew up in a musical family and always fixed his own guitars.

 

He has now fixed 11 Katrina-damaged instruments, mostly on a volunteer basis for parishioners at St. Dominic Catholic Church in Lakeview, where he is a parishioner. He recommended throwing away one instrument and is still trying to figure out how to begin repairing two violins, including one that fragmented into 37 pieces.

 

Sentimental value permeates McGee's projects, such as when he restored a guitar that a parishioner had bought from a classmate in 1966. The sight of the revived instrument brought tears to its owner's eyes.

 

New Orleans bassist Chris Severin brought five damaged instruments to Giardina's shop, including a grime-coated six-string that Giardina made for Severin in the mid-1990s. Severin has four more instruments in his garage that he will eventually seek to get fixed.

 

All the furniture in his house near the New Orleans Fair Grounds was piled by his back door after the flood. "When the water drained, it's like it pulled it out the back," said Severin, who has played with Dr. John, Dianne Reeves, Allen Toussaint and other prominent musicians.

 

"I had some guitars hanging on a wall in the studio, and they all came apart," Severin said. Giardina told him not to throw anything away.

 

"He can do it," Severin said of Giardina's talent in restoring instruments. "If anybody can do it, he can."

 

Giardina experienced minor storm damage to his Marrero home and no flooding at his shop, but he closed the business for about six months as he waited for musicians to return.

 

For a time, he thought he would have to move out of state, that his clientele was forever dispersed. Then his customer base began to rebound. Now he's optimistic about the region's recovery, eager to continue a 30-year career and launching plans to start making violins.

 

"I try to help people," Giardina said. "I was a musician in this city at one time. It's not an easy thing to do."

 

Cases filled with water

 

Isaac, whose gigs include playing with bandleader Bobby Cure and teaching music lessons at Loyola University and Ridgewood Preparatory School in Metairie, vividly remembers searching his wrecked apartment for his instruments.

 

"Nothing was recognizable because the ceiling had caved in," Isaac said. "Ceiling tiles and insulation had kind of molded over everything."

 

When he finally opened his guitar cases, water gushed out.

 

Displaced to Birmingham and then to a friend's house in Gretna before settling into an apartment in Algiers Point, Isaac got Giardina to quickly fix one guitar that he needed for a series of gigs in Shreveport while New Orleans remained in limbo.

 

The floodwater left an ashen grain in the wood and turned the guitar's knobs from white to a rich yellow, but Giardina returned the instrument to top playing condition.

 

Giardina and Isaac joked that its disaster-generated vintage look could increase its cachet and value.

 

"People will ask about it and go, 'Whoa, that's an old guitar,' " Isaac said. "Actually, it's not. It's Katrina-aged."

 

. . . . . . .

 

Mark Waller may be reached at mwaller@timespicayune.com or (504) 883-7056.

Just some food for thought, and the ears...

-KIE