Ideas - Swinging and Singing: The Violin

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

For musician and radio producer, David Schulman, the violin can swing and sing like nothing else. Schulman recently travelled to the north of Italy to try and discover the original trees from which Antonio Stradivari made his masterpieces. It’s a journey of surprise and delight. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 28, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. Today's episode features two documentaries, both featuring the majesty and magic of the violin. And both by the same person. I'm David Shulman, radio maker and violinist. David is based in Washington, D.C.,

but his quest took him to Cremona in the north of Italy. This is the story of a single tree. The tree he's looking for is the one that produced the greatest name in violins, Stradivarius. It was a lot like this one. Tall, some lichen on the upper branches,

and surprisingly slender for its age. This tree grew high up in the Alps at a time known as the Little Ice Age. The winters were colder, the glaciers were actively expanding, and the alpine forest was forbidding and wild. Then, more than 300 years ago, someone appeared in the forest. They appreciated this tree in a different way.

And with the tools they carried with them, they took it down. carried with them, they took it down. I'm in a forest, high in the Dolomites, in the Italian Alps. Luthiers realized hundreds of years ago that these fine-grained alpine spruce yield the ideal resonant wood for stringed instruments. Lutes, guitars, and violins, like this one. Its top was carved from that the spruce from up here is the ideal wood not just for violin makers. These spruce are also the perfect tree for people we call dendrochronologists.

Dendro for tree, chronology for time. At this altitude, the wood of the spruce directly reflects climate conditions that unfolded during the tree's lifetime. Some years the annual rings are thicker, some years thinner, and by cross-matching samples from the trunks of many different trees, dendrochronologists can establish timelines that reach back from the present far, far, far into the past. I'm very careful. I mean, I will never kill an instrument unless I know for sure.

That's Peter Ratcliffe. He's a luthier. He's also a practicing dendrochronologist. He told me the best way to take pictures that show the tree rings on a violin, and then we connected over Zoom. So you got my photographs of my fiddle, yeah? I have indeed, yeah. They are pretty perfect perfect and I can see everything right from the edges. Peter's actually one of the world's top experts in violin dendrochronology. From his workshop in the UK, he can examine a photo of a violin and determine the earliest date that it could have been made.

If the dates are right, his work can support a claim that a particular violin was made by a particular famous maker. This can add to its value, sometimes a lot. Dendro can also reveal a fraud. And Peters sometimes is compelled to deliver really bad news. As the saying goes, he has to kill a violin. news. As the saying goes, he has to kill a violin. More than once, Peters even had to debunk a violin attributed to the most famous maker of all time, Antonio Stradivari. Now it's a critical component of anyone who's buying or selling a violin.

Christopher Rooning is one of the world's leading violin experts and dealers, and he was an early adopter of violin dendro. It's a major tool in my toolbox when I'm trying to figure out who made something. Right. And I feel sometimes a little guilty because my predecessors never had the advantage of having this dendrochronology data at their fingertips. I sort of feel like I'm cheating a little bit because I'm able to use my knowledge, my eye, my experience, but I also have this extra tool that nobody else ever had.

Some people have managed to create chronologies which are 500 or 600 years old by sampling some medieval buildings or some very old chalets. The violin I sent photos of to Peter was a bit of a mystery to me. It's quite gracefully carved. There's no label, not even a fake one. Now, I'm just going to put that data file through the process of cross-dating, and

it's going to take about 12 seconds or so. I have to admit, I'd spent a lot of time examining this fiddle for clues, wondering where it came from, and what stories it could tell. And there we are. So, let's have a quick look one two so i have

about 1400 of my files yeah that react to the ring pattern from your violin and that suggests the same date, which is 1827. 1827 being the very last ring on your violin. In 1827, the tree was still in the forest. 1400 other instruments all agreed. It was like they were all singing the date together. 1827. That's the latest year the tree was growing in a forest like this, high up in the Alps. My fiddle's top, Peter can also tell, was made from a single piece of spruce. So if you count the rings from right to left,

that's treble to bass on my fiddle, you start at 1827 and you go back in time from there. You travel back to the time of Paganini. You travel back through the entire lifespan of Mozart. Back through the whole life of the American violinist named Thomas Jefferson. And you go back before any European set foot on the land of Australia. Back 50 years farther than that, to the year Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his Chaconne. Back even into the last years of the Little Ice Age, when glaciers expanded throughout the Alps.

Back, back, back, all the way to 1696, more than three centuries ago. When Peter Ratcliffe does a dendro analysis, occasionally, quite rarely in fact, the match between the wood of two violins turns out to be especially strong. Strong enough to say these instruments were made from a single tree.

Two violins, one tree. Peter's first clue for this comes from something that doesn't seem too musical. It's a statistical indicator called T-value. T-value. T-value is the level of relationship, put in sort of simple words, between two pieces of wood. My fiddle's dendro test didn't turn up any same-tree siblings. My fiddle's dendro test didn't turn up any same-tree siblings, but over decades of testing thousands and thousands of violins, Peter has identified a special group of 22 instruments. Their t-values and other important criteria match up extremely closely. So closely, they pretty much have to have been carved from a single log of spruce. One tree, 22 violins. So I got pretty excited to ask Chris Rooning about this one.

All these violins were built between 1708 and 1718, and by just one maker whose name you probably know. Yeah, Stradivari, yeah. One tree, 22 Stradivaris. He worked the wood of this tree again and again. It was during his so-called golden period when he made his most fabulous and most coveted instruments. They are the strads of all strads.

And Peter's extensive databases don't show any other maker having access to this special tree. It was just Antonio Stradivari. Stradivari was very successful. He was working there with his sons, creating quite a number of instruments. And the fact that he would buy, let's assume he bought several whole trees that he liked. When you're using the same tree over and over and over and over and over again, you can really hone in on what it takes to make that really sound good. Does it need to be thinner or thicker? Does it want a full arch? Does it want a flatter arch? He liked the wood quality in this tree, and he used it consistently for a period of time until it was used up and moved on to the next tree

or two. I think that's fantastic and very enlightening about his methods. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also, I meanening about his methods. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also, I mean, this one tree, what are we talking about the value of the instruments that came from that tree? So the record price for a Stradivari golden period is about $20 million. Some of them are only worth $6 or $7 million. So take an average of $14 million, let's say, and times however many came out of that one tree, and that's your number.

Let me get the calculator. Yeah. 14 times $22 million. So that's $308 million. Yeah, that's a valuable tree right there. Yeah, makes you wonder about the tree next door, right? Yeah, that's a valuable tree right there. Yeah, makes you wonder about the tree next door, right? Yeah, exactly. So if you look through violin books,

you'll see that many of Stradivari's violins have been given names. From just this one tree, there's the Medici Strad, the Empress Caterina, the Boissier, there's also the Allard, the Leonora Jackson, and the Cremonese. The Cremonese Strad is named for Cremona. It's the town where Stradivari lived and worked well into his 90s. I'm in Cremona now, sitting on a park bench near the spot where Stradivari's workshop used to stand. There's some guys playing dominoes in the park.

The building that held Stradivari's workshop was torn down in 1938. But 300 years ago, within a block or two of this park bench, you'd find the workshops of several of the greatest violin makers who ever lived. Cremona today is again a busy center of all things violin. Near the main piazza, there's a museum, the Museo del Violino.

Inside, you can find rare instruments by the Amaris, the Guineris, and Stradivari. To be invited to play one of these instruments, you need to be a special violinist. The keeper of the keys is curator Fausto Cacciatori. Ecco qua, è tutto tuo. Grazie. That's virtuoso soloist Fabrizio von Arx. On this day he's been given the chance to play the prize violin of the museum's collection. That's the Cremonese Strad, or the Cremonese, as the Italians say. I asked Fabrizio what it's like to play it.

Of course, a big emotion, a sensation, incredible, because every time that you take a Stradivari in your hand and start playing, the space at the sound of the future. You're able to interpret not only the music of the time of Stradivari, but also the contemporary music. It's a time machine for the feelings. Have you actually played the Cremonese before? No, this is the first time. This is the first day you've played the Cremonese?

Yeah, that's also incredible. So when you first set your bow to the strings today, what did you hear and feel? I don't know. I feel that I played this violin a lot of times all my life. We cannot explain really with words. After Cremona, I flew to Los Angeles. I went there to visit an eminent surgeon. He's a urologist named Dr. Bill Sloan. Dr. Sloan also makes violins.

Some people think that your training in surgery gives you some ability as a violin maker. I would like to hope that's true, but there are many famous violin makers who are not surgeons. I've played Dr. Sloan's violins, and they do sound good. But he's the first to admit they are no match for another fiddle he has around the house. It's a Stradivari from 1714,

the one known as the Leonora Jackson. It's one of those 22 sibling violins. So here's the thing. Ever since dendrochronologist Peter Ratcliffe showed me the evidence that 22 Stradivaris share wood from the exact same tree, I'd been kind of obsessed. Would it be possible, somewhere, somehow, to reunite members of this musical family tree? These violins are all over the world now. The Cremonese Strad is in Cremona. Others are in Paris, Madrid, Los Angeles. But there is Zoom. It's an evening in Corona. Yeah, it's like, it's about, it's a left of five o'clock. Hello. I'm here with Bill Schwab. Very nice to meet you. Sounds pretty good.

Thank you. So, Fabrizio, what would you say if I told you that the wood of the top of this instrument, the Cremonese, and more than 20 other Stradivaris, all came from the very same tree? It was a good tree, huh? Really, it was a good tree. It was a good tree. name of Jacques Francais. As a youngster, I used to visit him, and he said, when you play a Stradivari, like the Cremonisi or the Leonore Jackson, the violin tells you exactly how to play it.

If you don't do what the violin says, you will miss the beautiful sound. Yeah, I felt this exactly. The resonance is always so rich, like... is always so rich, like... The tone, every tone of each note and every vibration of this, step after step is suggesting what you have to do the other step. When you play a Stradivari,

every note is different, has a different character, has a beautiful quality. Exactly. And as you go to the next note, it's exposing you to a new sound you never heard before. And when you go to the next note, a new beautiful sound, nothing is the same. And every time you play the same piece over again,

it's a different experience. Because every note is a character like a voice yeah you know you're right completely right if there is a chord that make you i don't know crying or sentimental it picks this is crying with you it's like a voice close to the human voice that's why i think it's so human as stradivari that we started to give a name to this violin. Bill and Judy Sloan bought the Leonora Jackson Strad about 40 years ago. Leonora Jackson was an American soloist. In the early 20th century, she gave hundreds of concerts

across the United States and Europe. Phil, I wonder, would you be able to take out the Leonora Jackson so that the Leonora Jackson can meet the Cremonese? Sure. Oh, grandissimo. Look, the boot. Fabrizio, if you had the chance to play side by side these two instruments, do you think you could tell that there was this family resemblance?

Who knows, but why not? I have to try, so tomorrow I'm coming to Los Angeles. So this violin was made in 1714 when Stradivari was 70 years old. Same year as Itzhak Perlman's Stradivari of 1714. So, Bill, would it be possible to hear some of the sound of the Leonore Jackson? Do you want to play it?

I would love for you to play it if you're willing to play just a note or two. I think you should play it. Please, play some notes. Chin rest. Wow, it just feels like it wants to lift into the air. And I will tell you, Fabrizio, this is an extraordinary moment for me.

I've never held a Stradivari before, and certainly not played one before.... That is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Incredibile. Fabrizio, I just... This is the moment when I feel like I should try to describe what it was just like to do that. And I don't know that there are words for it. There is no words, exactly.

Looking out at the spruce trees surrounding me in this forest high up in the Dolomites, there's something about the story of this single tree growing somewhere in the Alps back in the 1600s. For the people who occasionally passed by, this tree gave no sign what music would later come from the resonant vibration of its wood. This tree grew at a time when the climate was colder.

The glaciers of the Alps were still expanding rather than melting. Back then, alpine spruce might take two years to grow just a millimeter across. Yet the forest of this tree, this special violin tree, might have looked, sounded, and even had a scent in the air, much like the landscape where I am hiking now. There are legends about where Stradivari got his wood. Fantastic stories of the great maker himself venturing into the alpine forests, tapping spruce trunks, listening and somehow divining

that he'd found the tree. Tourist markers even suggest that Stradivari's wood came from a particular spot. But many violin experts say those are romantic fantasies. When I was back in Cremona, I asked Peter about it. This tree that was the source of this wood on the top of 22 of Stradivari's violins, can dendrochronology tell us where this tree actually grew? Sadly not. We can say when. We can even say

which tree. But to say where, we would need a different way to travel back in time. Now we can say this much. It's possible that the spruce tree Stradivari carved into 22 violins grew in this forest in the Alps, where I'm walking now with my violin. It is also possible that the tree Stradiv were used grew in the next valley over, or five valleys over, or that it grew in a remote, equally charmed spot far across the mountains to the west, somewhere else high up in the Alps. in the Alps.

That documentary was called One Tree, In Search of Stradivari's Sibling Violins by David Shulman. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true Ayyad. in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. The violin has four strings. This is my fiddle. My new fiddle. It is not a Stradivarius. For contributor David Schulman,

those four strings can speak to us. I want to play you some music from a record I bootlegged in college on cassette tape. It's jazz violinist Stuff Smith. Hit play, and you can hear what a great time stuff along with the whole band and everybody else in the bar stuff grew up in Ohio who's born in 1909 his dad ran a small-town barbershop, and he steered his son towards the classics, Dvorak.

When Stuff was about nine years old, he got his hands on an early Louis Armstrong record, and that changed everything. He put that record on the Victrola and tried to make his violin sound like Armstrong's trumpet. Stuff made the hip-braid in the 1930s. Armstrong himself recorded one of Stuff's tunes. Stuff later recorded with Ella Fitzgerald, and even Yasha Heifetz used to go to the clubs to hear Stuff play jazz on the violin. I was a college kid when I bootlegged my first Stuff Smith album from 1965. It's called Swingin' Stuff. Thirty years later, on a cold night in Chicago, I walked into a record store. And there it was again. Swingin' Stuff, the LP.

I started collecting Stuff Smith records. The more I listened, the more I was hooked all over again. Regina Carter is today's top jazz violinist. That's according to Downbeat, the long-running U.S. jazz magazine. She's also a big Stuff Smith fan. He makes it talk. What do you hear him doing in that? It's just like when he's in Sweet Lorraine,

it's like, it's talking to you. You know exactly what his personality. I feel like he was a character, a jokester. That's what it feels like, the way he plays. It's serious, he's playing the hell out of his violin in those solos, but there's laughter, there's lightheartedness.

And then when he strikes it, like that, he makes everybody listen. He's such a charmer. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I would think he'd be a ladies' man, you know? And just with his violin, he could do it all just playing his violin. So Stuff was married four times officially. Officially. In the eyes of the law. Right. But his fourth wife is Arlene Smith. I wrote a book on spectrophotometric applications. A book on

what applications? Spectrophotometric. Ah, okay. That's Arlene at 93. When I was a kid, the only music I ever reacted to was Beethoven. When Beethoven was playing, all of a sudden I understood music. I understood everything he was thinking, everything he was wanting to do. Any other music was just a bunch of notes to me. Until I heard stuff. And when first time I heard stuff I got that same reaction. I understood everything he was thinking and feeling. I asked Arlene to help me imagine the first time she heard Stuff perform live.

That was in Chicago, right? Oh, yeah. Well, the first time I ever saw him, he went around and kissed every woman in the nightclub. And they were all with their boyfriends and husbands. Nobody seemed to object to that, even though they were all white and he wasn't. He invited us to his home after he got through playing.

So we went with my boyfriend and his sister in a blizzard. He promised that he would help Bob's sister learn something on the piano. He was going to give her a piano lesson at 4 o'clock in the morning. Somebody slept in the chairs, somebody slept on the tables. One guy slept in the bathtub. I slept on the tables. One guy slept in the bathtub. We spent every week the same way,

sleeping over in his apartment, waking up in the morning, having breakfast. One day I realized I was in love, and he was not. He left town. I kept track of him. I always say I chased him for five years until he finally caught me. And then how did you finally get together? It was in California, right? He finally came to California and let me know he was there, and that was it.

We found a wedding chapel, and at 7 o'clock at night on New Year's Eve, 1955, we got married. Stop, look, who's that kissing? Stop, look, what you're missing? Oh, how my heart sighs when you roll those great big eyes. Steph and Arlene found a place in a mixed-race neighborhood of L.A. Some of their parties were recorded by a friend on an early portable tape recorder. People came and visited us day and night. I always said it was like Grand Central Station.

We had people coming in all the time. The kids in the neighborhood loved to hang out in our house. And Steph would invite everybody. He'd go to the grocery store and buy a pack of cigarettes. He'd invite the guy behind the counter and says, come and bring your friends. So we had a small half a house, and we'd have 200 people in there, elbow to elbow.

The band would be in the dining room. The pot smokers would be in the kitchen. The kids would be out in the front yard playing, and I'd be in the backyard barbecuing tuna fish. People would be white and black and young and old. Around midnight, all the white folks would go home, and then the real party would start. She said, at midnight, all the white folks would go. I don't care.

Is she African-American? Nope. That is so funny. Oh, my God. Yeah. You know, I romanticize what those times were like. When you hear stories like that, you think, man, those were really the days to have those house parties and have the band in the house. And really, when we think about it,

those were some extremely tough times for them, being African Americans especially. They couldn't stay in hotels. But just listening to the music and hearing these stories makes it sound like, oh, I wish I could go back in time and at least drop in on one of those parties. Come on, Rex, let's blow this up. What are you blowing?

Not bubbles, though. I mean, that's your problem, isn't it Come on Rex, let's blow this up. What is blowin'? Not bubbles though. I mean that's your problem. Alright, that's my problem. Sunnyside, you know that. In the key of C. I want some vocals. That's Stuff playing a house party. The trumpet is Rex Stewart from Duke Ellington's band. Listen to Stuff swing.

And he's completely undisturbed by people tapping along on their whiskey glasses, or whatever else they got in their hands. This recording came to me in a transatlantic parcel, sent to me by Anthony Barnett. So, hello Dave, this is Anthony. He's a British poet. He's also the world's leading authority on Stuff Smith. Anthony's published several books on Stuff, and CDs too, including those rare house party tapes. But Anthony wasn't eager to do a radio interview.

He wants to let others tell the story now. He put me in touch with Stuff's widow, Arlene. I live in Duluth, Minnesota, which is pretty far north. Pretty far north and pretty far from America's centers of jazz. Arlene moved there to take care of her aging parents. They disowned her in 1955 after she married a black man. My family kicked me out. I wrote to them and told them, and they immediately called my sister and said, if she even talks to me, and they immediately called my sister and said, if she even talks to me, she would be disinherited also.

And I said, also? And I thought it was pretty funny. Did you ever speak to your family members again after that? Oh, yeah, I wrote to them every year. I never got an answer. But then after he died, I guess I was accepted back. I love him. what else matters. Listen to that sound. Just the tone of it.

It's not a traditional violin sound. A little rough around the edges, and it resonates powerfully in your chest. I spent hours playing along with my Stuff Smith records, trying to replicate his warm, powerful tone. And I just couldn't do it. So I talked with my teacher, Eddie Drennan. I saw him once. Eddie was a high school student when he heard Stuff Smith play at the Hollywood Club in Washington, D.C.

I was about 16 or 17. I guess it was around 57. He was very loose, and he swung. And I picked up a lot of things from him. One thing Eddie learned that night was what device Stuff used to capture the sound of his violin and route it through an amplifier. He used a pickup, first marketed in 1948. It was designed by a guitarist named Harry D. Armand. I handed Eddie my fiddle and rummaged around in my bag

for something I'd bought on eBay. Look what's in here. Oh. It's D'Armond. Eddie used them when he toured with Bo Diddley in the 1960s. You place it on top of the violin. This piece of cork

sends a vibration to this piece of steel. Instead of getting a high tinny sound, you get a nice warm sound. The year Eddie heard him play, Stuff released a record. It was titled simply Stuff Smith. His sidemen included jazz legends Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. The cover is a big photograph of Stuff with his violin. You can see it's vividly flamed wood and his pickup.

When we met, I showed it to Regina Carter. Let me actually show you something. Do you have this record? Take a look at that. Yeah. I remember this pickup. I used to have one of these. Yeah?

I remember when I first heard his sound on recordings, I was like, it sounded like a viola. So I kept trying to figure out, and then, I don't know if it was Ray Brown, or someone told me that he used to use a mute on the violin, on the bridge. But yeah, there he's got the mute on there. Yeah, it definitely makes a difference. It makes the violin a lot darker. The recordings that I especially love, like the ones in the 50s and 60s, actually,

that tone that he's getting, he's playing with this DeArmond pickup that they had at that point, going through a tube amplifier. Which helps. Mm-hmm. The tubes make it a lot warmer, and I don't know that you can even find any of those today. Oh, you can, actually.

Oh, really? Yeah, no, actually, no, so this is my whole... So you can hear I was getting excited. I just spent weeks tracking down vintage tube amps like those stuff had used. Baroque violinists will use archaic bows with raw gut strings just to get closer to the music they love. And guitarists, guitarists will pay thousands of dollars

to get the exact gear used by Keith Richards or Herb Ellis. So that 1957 album cover had set me on a quest. I was trying to get as close as I could to the full rig Stuff Smith used 60 years ago. Amplifier, pickup, mute, and violin. On the back cover of that album, you'll see Stuff described as the palpitating

Paganini. But it was a different line that really did make my heart race. I showed it to Regina Carter. If it seems unusual for anyone to play an amplified violin in the first place, Smith's own Guarnerius, it might be added, is valued at $5,000. Is that supposed to be a Guarneri? Like a Guarneri del Gesu? Violins made by Guarneri del Gesu are among the world's most coveted instruments.

Only about 200 still exist. They've sold for close to $16 million. That's... So... Because, you know, when I think a name like that, Guarneri, just like Stradivarius, automatically that price tag would be a heck of a lot more than $5,000. But who knows?

Yeah. Well, when I read that line, I was like, is it possible that stuff had a Guarneri? And was that the source of his powerful tone? It seems far-fetched, but old violins did cost less in 1957. Jack Benny, the comedian, paid $25,000 that year for a Strad. So $5,000 for a Guarneri seems plausible. And if Stuff actually did have a Guarneri,

a top dealer could probably tell me who's got it today. Arlene Smith, Stuff's widow, had the real scoop. He had a violin that was made as a copy of a Guarneri's by a man in Michigan who made violins. And it was a copy of a Guarneri's by a man in Michigan who made violins and it was a copy of a Guarneri's now at one time he had had a what's a big violin Stradivarius given to him by Ann Southern the movie star wow he was having an affair with her oh Jesus gave him a Stradivarius and he came home one night in New York.

He fell asleep in the subway. When he woke up, the violin was gone. Now, this whole story sounds like one of those crazy blues stuff used to sing. I'm not saying it's true. But I will say that stuff was friendly with some big Hollywood names. Ann Southern was

a glamorous blonde star. She played a violinist in a 1943 romantic comedy from MGM. So they had an affair, and she gave him the Stradivarius. Right. Well, her husband came home, and he spent the night hiding under the bed. Her husband came home unexpectedly, and so Stuff spent the night under the bed. Baby, baby, baby, baby, where did you stay last night? That's all I want to know.

I said baby, baby, baby, baby, where did you park that mess last night? When I met him, he had three violins and the copy of the Granarius. Big Red is his favorite. That's what he played most of the time. And that was stolen at one point. It was stolen? Yes. We had had a quarrel one night. He ran out and jumped in the car.

I ran out and jumped in it too. We rode around for 20 minutes, settled our differences. And when we came back, we could see some guys running down the street carrying stuff, not realizing that they had been in our house. They had been casing the house next door. And when they saw us run out, they came in and took what they wanted. Did you get a phone call or something? Yeah, we got a phone call from this Austrian man who had heard Stuff play that violin one time. And he said, your violin is in a pawn shop in East Los Angeles.

And so Stuff went there with a policeman guy in a pawn shop, says, no, you've got to pay for it. I paid for it, you've got to pay for it. So he got his violin back. But he was in a depression for a whole year from missing his violin. But after he had it back, that cured the depression, huh? It sure did. Does she still have his violin?

Ah, that's the question, isn't it? ah, that's the question, isn't it? Regina Carter has recorded using the violin that once belonged to Paganini himself. And if you're trying to get closer to the sound of Stuff Smith, there may be no bigger question than this. What happened after he died to Stuff's violin? Stuff lived his last two and a half years in Europe. He was an unapologetic whiskey drinker, and that caught up with him in 1967.

Arlene wasn't with him at the end. His companion in his last year was a young Danish woman named Eva. She saw that Stuff got his last wishes, burial in Denmark, and having a favorite piece played at his funeral. It's one he used to pick out on the piano at home, Debussy's Claire de Lune. When Stuff died, Arlene was back in the U.S. I was into astrology,

and I told everybody something terrible was going to happen to me because it was the worst thing I ever saw in astrology. And I said, either I'm going to die or my husband's going to die. The lawyer for our company was a black guy who was a fan of stuff. And he came to my office, and I could tell by the minute he walked in the office. New York Times had a big, long article. And it felt like the whole world had died. I just felt like I was sitting on a dead planet.

Big, dead rock. How did you manage in those years afterwards? I don't know. It's been many years, and I still miss them. Arlene was 43. She never remarried. Ava sent Big Red back to Arlene in the U.S. Arlene sent it on to Stuff's son, Jackie. Fifty years later, I called Stuffsmith scholar Anthony Barnett.

He was able to give me an old address and phone number for the family, but the number was disconnected. The house had been sold. And there are a lot of Smiths in the phone book. I made a list, filtered by age, family connections, and some hunches. I called my share of wrong numbers. And then, one Friday, I called a number and heard this voicemail prompt. Yeah, it's John. Give me your name, your number, and if you're somebody you like, I'll call you back. I hung up. Early the next morning, my phone rang. It was John Smith. His phone had captured my number. He asked why I called. I told him the story. He told me he was Stuff's grandson.

He told me he was Stuff's grandson. He said they had a violin, but he didn't know if it was Big Red. Two other violins had been lost in a fire. A few days later, I got a text with four images of a violin in a buttery yellow case. The sides and back were made of flamed wood. The tailpiece had four parallel wear marks, exactly the marks you'd expect a de-armand pickup to leave. It was almost 50 years to the day since Snuffsmith died. I sent Antony Barnett the photos, and he confirmed it. Yes, this was Big Red.

I live about 400 miles from John and his sister Cheryl, and we agreed to meet at the old train station in Buffalo, New York. The city had been the home of their father, Jackie Smith, son of Stuff. John clutched the violin case in his hands. We went to a nearby hotel to talk about their grandfather. Cheryl and John last saw Stuff in the early 1960s when they were small kids. He was quite the celebrity, even for us. I mean, in some ways, he was untouchable. I remember my grandfather coming down in an entourage kind of a deal. But my memory is of two guys in white suits and how much they loved seeing one another. My dad had all of his war stories from Korea and my grandfather had all of his stories about the road.

And then they just bustled out of the house. All of the house seemed to just sag after they were gone. All the excitement was over. Whenever they were out somewhere at a restaurant or at a bar, my grandfather's fingers were always moving. He was always running up and down the scales, dry scaling on a table. But my father had all of the latest albums and he played them and he played them. They were lovely to listen to. Just having this delicious music play. My father was the type that would blast it. Listen to that. Nobody can do that like my dad. That's my dad right there. That's my dad. How did the violin come back to you all?

It was sent in shipping crates that came with a number of things. I think clothing. Unfortunately, a lot of the memorabilia were destroyed, and a house fire and the ensuing water damage just destroyed a lot of this stuff. Late 60s, wasn't it? Late 60s, 68 maybe. So over the years that you've had it, how is it kept? Pretty much as you see.

Pretty much as you see. This is how it came. There's something in there rattling around. Would it be okay if I picked it up and see what kind of sound we can get out of it? Sure, sure, good. So what's rolling around in there is something called the sound post, which helps the instrument vibrate and really sing. Okay.

So when I play it, it really won't sound full. instrument vibrate and really sing. So when I play it, it really won't sound full. So this is lower than a violinist tune, but I don't want to bring it anywhere near the real pitch. Stuff Smith played Big Red for about 21 years. After his death, it rested in its case for another 50 years. But now John and Cheryl Smith say they'd like to hear Stuff's violin played again by some of the top jazz violinists of today. You know, it's not for one of those little fogey types. Not that I don't like classical, but it's not.

It's jazzy. Grandpa was jazzy. Oh yeah, he was. He wasn't an old rocking chair person. He was jamming. Or as my dad would say, swing it. That's right. Swing it. Absolutely.

The violin wants to dance. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's jazzy. Cheryl and John Smith, grandchildren of jazz violinist Stuff Smith. Music in the background is Stuff's tune, Only Time Will Tell, from Swingin' Stuff, a live album from 1965. We also heard from jazz violinists Regina Carter and Eddie Drin. Special thanks to Antony Barnett for his generosity in sharing his expertise on Stuff Smith and providing rare recordings for use in this broadcast.

And very special thanks indeed to Stuff's widow Arlene Smith for all her memories and good humor. Nobody Swung Harder, the jazz violin of Stuff Smith by contributor David Shulman. Both of David Shulman's documentaries originally aired on The History Listen from our friends at ABC Australia. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Nicola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly.

And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. of ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayyad.