JB Violins is tucked into a small building off Alley 38, just south of West Bonita Avenue in Claremont. One might expect its location in Claremont is the result of the arts-friendly college culture of this community located just inside LA County’s eastern-most edge.
After all, the Folk Music Center founded by Ben Harper’s grandfather is just around the corner. The nearby city Post Office is home to a W.P.A.-sponsored mural painted by Milford Zornes. Down the street is a 1927 train station built for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway now on the National Register of Historic Places because of its Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. Claremont: arts friendly, historic, culturally aware.
But no. The reason, like Jim Brown’s philosophy, is simpler.
He loved seeing the purple jacaranda blossoms that cascade as he drove up Indian Hill Boulevard in late spring. His first shop was in a 250-square-foot space at what is known as the Old School House at the northwest corner of Indian Hill and Foothill Boulevard.
When he opened his doors more than 25 years ago, Brown had only two instruments to show, violin and cello, though each was highly rated. The venture marked a return to an old love that had never really faded.
“I always fiddled with wood in my life, starting in about the sixth grade,” he said.
That fiddling around led to stints repairing wooden golf clubs, teaching golf as club pro, exchanges with Dodgers and Angels players at Orange County courses, turf management and eventually an apprenticeship with a Riverside-based luthier who taught him how to make instruments in the Italian style.
It was a long way round to where he is today.
Discovering wood and art
Born in Fontana, Brown started tinkering with building marionettes in grade school after an aunt who had a collection of the puppets gave him issues of 1930s-era Popular Mechanics which diagrammed how to make everything needed for a complete miniature theater and players.
With a love of woodworking and musical arts ranging from classical guitar to choral, he expected to make a career as a music educator. But upon graduating from college in the 1970s and recognizing a bleak outlook for arts in schools, Brown had second thoughts and, as he puts it, “turned tail and ran,” venturing instead into a career professional golf.
But dreams, like first loves, don’t easily fade away.
When he wasn’t teaching or managing a golf course, he was working as a professional singer in downtown LA. He also was hanging around violin shops and decided he wanted to make a cello and found himself most interested in making instruments in the Italian way, in line with the methods of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, who was rivaled only by Antonio Stradivari.
Origins of the craft
For a fee, Brown apprenticed himself to Ruth Esther Evans, a Riverside luthier who had studied with Italian maker Mario Antono Frosali who had worked in New York before moving to Los Angeles.
In his recollection of his early career, Brown pauses to sketch out the history that brought the violin to today’s excellence and lands on a point of contention in the world of classical music: Stradivari or Guarneri. Both Italians crafted fine instruments. But of those violins, Brown most cherishes the Guarneri for their power, projection and brilliance.
Violinpros.com compares the two styles of violin as being like white and red wines. The Strads are light, sweet and precise, while the Guarneri yield tones with deep, dark richness.
As Brown puts it, Stradivari was a genius in mind and culture and took the violin and changed it completely. The layout, the arch size — “the whole bloody thing, and it turned out just right,” Brown said. The Strads were almost perfect, and while the Guarneri had flaws in the making, they more than made up for it in quality of sound.
“The violin has never been improved since then,” Brown said. While some, mostly retired engineers are still trying to make it better, he says, there’s one thing lacking: romance.
“The Germans make their violins by measuring, measuring, measuring. The Italians make them by just drawing lines, perceiving their lines, perceiving their shapes, conceiving what is and just making it.”
“The violin lets you know it was made by a person. That’s the most important thing. You know when you look at an Italian violin, you know it was made by a person, by hand. You look at a German (instrument), and they are so spec’d out, so perfect in every way. … But they’re not, because they lack the presence of the human spirit. …
“That’s something that Frosali used to teach, ‘Never make your violins too perfect, or they won’t trust you.’”
Carrying on traditions
To step inside Brown’s shop today is to enter a world of brown hues, richly toned woods and instruments waiting for the hand of a musician or craftsman.
To the left hang rows of violins ranging in sizes scaled for children to full-sized instruments and larger violas. Also on the wall, like racks of arrows, are perhaps 100 bows. On the floor, a standing cluster of 20 or so cellos, in three rows including a few in the corner. To the right of the door, various standing instrument cases and a partition from the old shop.
It can be a busy place. Customers are advised to make an appointment, but regulars drop by to pick up or leave an instrument or bow. Not surprising, considering Brown’s is a place of repair, restoration and rentals.
But the instruments themselves, he says, are living creatures. As such, they respond to changes in humidity and the weather.
During the recent winds and fires, Southern California’s relative humidity levels dropped to exceptional lows reaching, by some reports, into the single digits.
“When that happens, every cello in the shop comes unstrung. And violins too, because the wood gives off the moisture. … (Then) the holes expand, and all the pegs let go.”
“We hear our instruments unwind in the shop throughout the day, ‘piinngg,’ like that, a peg will let go and ‘piinngg.’ …
Then it gets rainy, and music students call.
“‘I can’t turn my peg,’ because all that moisture is back. Now they’re stuck in there really, really tight. So we have to pull them all out and reseat them back in again. That’s the life of these instruments, all of them; it’s lesser on violins, but the bigger the instrument the more profound the effect.
“That’s part of what these instruments are all about, they are living creatures. And they change their voice and how they react and play.”
Professionals understand how to make adjustments, and makers too, Brown said, have to work on instruments in a mindful way aware of humidity levels where their customers live.
But when events occur, the calls come in.
“It’s kind of like what’s happening right now.”
Brown says his teacher Evans warned him if you open a business and are any good, you won’t have time to make violins. “They’ll swamp you with repairs, and they need them all at the last minute because the concert’s tonight or the rehearsal’s tomorrow, so you don’t have time to build.”
Normally, Brown says he might build a violin in three or four months; some luthiers just “crank them out,” building four, five or six violins a year. Brown’s projects of late have been taking a year and a half. Currently, he has three violins in different stages of production.
But having been a careful and voracious student, Brown is committed to giving back to the music and arts community. He works to help students, parents and educators and has given away instruments.
“We do take care of kids and their parents and try to promote music and arts of any kind in schools. And we live by that, and we honor that,” Brown said. He considers it part of the mission.
He also has directly taught about 15 adults and put together violin-making workshops with Chicago-based luthier Michael Darnton at the Claremont Colleges that ran 15 years. Over time, those five week-long summer sessions each year brought training in the Cremona, Italy, style of violin making to hundreds of students.
The pandemic shutdown and restrictions that followed ended that.
Tools, wood and workbenches
In his workshop today, Brown looks over an assortment of ready-to-hand tools and wood supplies.
He has three work stations, two oriented for repair and a third where he crafts new instruments. The bench is cluttered with the accouterments and leavings of his trade: shavings and bits of wood, files, pliers, a steel rule, a clamp, bow hair, small block planes, bottles of glue, thinners and oils, small bowls including a mortar and pestle.
It looks as much like a shrine as a workbench. It was previously owned by Frosali, his teacher’s mentor. Two black and white portraits of the mustachioed, balding Italian lean against the nearby wall.
Making a violin is not hard, Brown says. “It’s 77 pieces of wood you have to make. Not a one of them, by itself, is hard to do.” Cutting molds, blocks, cutting out a form, it needs to be done carefully, taking your time.
“It’s easy,” he adds. “Anybody can do that if you work with wood, if you can make that cut.
“You can’t use sandpaper on this wood, it just disturbs the surface and makes it look crappy. You’ve got to use sharp tools, sharp, sharp — sharper than what people think of as sharp. Sharper than a razor blade, you’ve got to know how to work with tools like that.
“Probably the most important element in making a violin comes from choosing the wood.”
The wood must be quartersawn, straight-grained, aged and stable, and following the steps, simple, but one step at a time.
Finding the right tone
So, with all this time dedicated to violins, does Brown enjoy playing what he works on?
“No. Why should I play them?”
Not to see how they sound?
“I can get everything out of them I need soundwise. That only needs open bows (bowing technique). But to hear the sounds a violin makes, you have to hear the overtones,” Brown said.
And in a sidestep into the mechanics of sound and music theory, he explains that a good violin has a lot of overtones: the fundamental, or primary, note when played also has a variety of components, those components and their complexity, yield the quality of sound.
While many people can discern the fundamental or dominant note and maybe a step or division above, very few can hear more of what makes the pitch. Brown hears more.
“That’s what makes me good at this, I have the hearing of a dog. It’s just a gift.
“I can hear the overtones up three or four levels … maybe the fifth on a good day.”
When you can hear the overtones that well, he says, when you can discern the pitches that well, you can bring the instrument into a fine level of tuning.
“I can adjust everything I need to adjust with just hearing those pitches. Not many people can do that.”
But to listen to Brown, it’s pretty clear what’s to be heard. It’s all about promoting the arts, giving back.
His relationship with music and craft?
Maybe it’s best described in the sheet music for a 1910 song on display in his store window: “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
