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Instruments & accessories

A violin, guitars, pick-ups, tuners, tailpieces and an amplifier, ca.1720-1950

The musical instruments and accessories assembled here were picked up over many years. The Balestrieri (possibly) violin came first, then the Gibson, followed by about a dozen guitars all designed for the musical genre most popularised but not originated by Django Reinhardt, Gypsy Jazz. My interest in gypsy music followed on a book I wrote as a student “Walking Good: Travels to Music in Romania and Hungary” (Weidenfeldt & Nicolson, 1970), and a BBC radio programme, “Music from Romania” made around the same time. If you are interested in knowing more please write to me, there is an enquiry form below.

Bernabe Busato 1943

1943 Bernabe Busato before and after restoration by Martin Tremblay, Montreal.

Restoration

Sonora, 1930s

Sonora guitars were made in the Busato workshop for a music shop in Paris. These were economy models, using cheaper woods, cheaper tuners, but sometimes Bernabe Busato himself would step in and take on an instrument.

Restoration

Siro Burgassi 1939

Siro Burgassi and Gino Papiri made less than a dozen guitars from around the early 1930s to wartime. One of them worked in Busato’s atelier and married Busato’s daughter. The woods on these instruments are sometimes rudimentary, sometimes spectacular, as wiith this instrument. The sound is terrific, again rounder than a regular Busato but with distinct Busato touches. All original features are here, including the faux tortoise-shell scratch plate. Original Delaruelle tuners. Completely restored, like almost all the instruments here, by Martin Tremblay of Montreal, who is playing on most of the demos here.

Restoration

Busato “Jazz” archtop, early 1950s

The bejeweled fingerboards between the plates flagged this as one of Busato’s experimental “Jazz” models. Throughout his career, Busato was partial to certain tones of red and green decoration on frets, machine heads and starfish patterns on scratch plates, and you can see these in the Sonora and with the rhinestone inlays on this instrument. Martin Tremblay did a lot of work on this instrument. This was a Bernabé Busato after all, spotted by sheer luck in poor light outside a supermarket in northern France, but a Busato nevertheless, with all its original tuners, a body that had certainly been round the block and the promise of a sunburst if you looked hard enough. Martin unglued the entire fretboard, nivelled the neck, and reglued the neck and the six decorated inlays. Busato glued his necks flush to the soundboard with a simple butt joint and a generous splash of glue straight from the pot, not a hint of a dovetail. Martin stripped the old finish, refilled, repaired and veneered all cracks and kinks, renewed the finish and the sunburst and refretted the entire board with bevelled ends. He put in a new bone saddle, polished up the cordier, scratch plate and tuners like new, and replaced the original knobs on the tuners with repros, just to épater les bourgeois, of whom there are far too many in the gypsy jazz world, for these are works of art that function, not museum pieces. Too bad the finish spotted up again.