Brass Heaven
On a crowded Midtown street, through a nondescript lobby, up nine floors in the elevator, at the end of a hallway, is a door labeled J. Landress Brass. I opened the door last Wednesday and stepped into brass heaven.
My wife Yvonne and I were spending a few days in New York with our good friends Tony and Cathy Plog, and, as always when Tony’s around, eventually the subject turned to trumpets.
“I’ve got a place for you,” Ray Mase told us at dinner the first night. Ray is Tony’s friend, fellow trumpeter, and chair of the brass department at Juilliard. “J. Landress Brass—you’ve got to go. He has Arban’s cornet. He has Schlossberg’s trumpet.”
J.B. Arban and Max Schlossberg were iconic trumpet soloists and teachers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was like hearing about Einstein’s slide rule or Babe Ruth’s Louisville Slugger. How could we not go?
So, a couple of days later, Tony and I headed across town, up that elevator, down that hallway, and through that door. We entered a large, high-ceilinged room lined with glass cases that literally gleamed, because they were filled with trumpets, cornets, and flugelhorns made of highly polished brass and silver. Hanging from the walls all around us, shining just as brightly, were French horns, trombones, and tubas.
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