A Tale of Two Cymbals
I’ve had a long love affair with sound, and objects that vibrate our human experience in beautiful ways.
Right around the turn of this century, I spent an afternoon talking about the business of music with a local jazz music producer, promoter, and philanthropist JoAnne Hasbrouck. At the end of the conversation, she asked me to wait for a moment while she went down into her basement to get something. When she returned, she gifted me her late husband’s hi-hat cymbals. They were 13” Zildjians, thin by today’s standards, and the edges were well worn showing that these had a long history of use already.
I tried using them as crash cymbals for a while, and as hi-hats, but the edges were so worn down that I couldn’t get a reliable “chick” out of them until one day 10 years ago when I decided to pair them up with a newer 13” bottom cymbal. That’s when I started to fall for these, especially one of the two that makes a great top for the types of music I play most often, where the audience is close enough that I’m playing unamplified. For several years now I’ve been playing with this gifted hi-hat top, and it has helped me better understand and hone my own sound.
I’ve gotten so attached to this hi-hat sound that I sometimes have worried how I would ever find a replacement should this one ever get dropped on its edge or stolen. You can’t just walk into a store and buy a thin 60-plus-year-old cymbal that’s still in good enough shape to handle the subtleties of acoustic jazz played for an audience that’s sitting 4 feet away and still survive the workout of a big band performance.
This week I was contacted by former high tech engineer, drummer and drum collector, Dan Chinn. He’s pairing down his collection of drums and cymbals and invited me to choose a cymbal as a gift. Amongst some amazing older cymbals, I found this lonesome 13” un-branded cymbal that could be described as my favorite hi-hat top’s “brother from another mother”. He’s a little darker in tone and ever so slightly thinner around the edge, but he’s definitely been played a bunch and still has a musical life ahead of him. He played his first gig with me last night and sounded great with the big band. Next will be the nightclub (smaller room test), but I’m confident he’ll fit right in there too. I may actually prefer his slightly darker tone too.
I’m thrilled to be playing these two cymbals now and giving them another chance to be heard. I wonder what the craftsman that created them might think of them if they could hear them now, what music they’ve played in the past, where they’ve traveled too an who their vibrations have touched.
A big thanks to JoAnne and Dan for gifting forward these beautiful objects so that they might sing again for others.