CYMBALISTIC: OK, I’m back in good old Portland, Oregon, recovered from my jet lag, and from a lingering post-travel cold.
This was the fifth visit I’ve made to Germany, bearing cymbals, and it’s always very rewarding— I get to show these splendid Cymbal & Gong instruments to a lot of great drummers and drumming students, and get their feedback, and maybe sell a few of them, and then they get to use them.
We had meets in Berlin (chez Michael, Mitte) and Dresden (Hochschule für Musik Dresden Carl Maria von Weber), and then, while I was having fun in Italy, Michael [Griener, our man in Berlin, cue Iron Man theme] took the remaining cymbals to a master class by Adam Nussbaum (Universität der Künste Berlin), who played them, and made some cryptic commentary:
…Nussbaum was showing off his own stuff that he was excited about, so I didn’t expect him to fawn over my cymbals, it’s still fun that he got to hit them. And now I’ll have something to talk about when I run into him.
I say this every time: it’s a big deal for real players to keep these cymbals around as their main instrument, for years. It’s exactly like a saxophonist getting the right mouthpiece, or bassist getting the right bass, or bow— they don’t keep shopping for new ones. It’s a drawback from a dealer’s perspective: once people get their set, they’re set— they have what they need, they don’t need to buy more cymbals. It’s how players do things, they get what they need, and, finding it, they use it.
So not all of my regular guys needed a lot of stuff. I was surprised that the usual most popular cymbals didn’t sell— the 22″ Extra Special Janavars, though it was agreed that they were wonderful. One talented student in Dresden played all three of them and they immediately sounded like his natural voice, but… no money. I would have been making some phone calls if I were him. You can tell when an instrument is destined to be your axe, and— despite the seeming proliferation of good cymbals— they don’t come up every day. You’re supposed to jump on these things when they come up.
No matter, the big winner is you— I have several very sweet Extra Special Janavars in both 20 and 22″ size, and you can hop on over to Cymbalistic to get yours, you’ll love it. I have one very lovely, lush one, named Raquel, and two funky bashers, named Christine and Matilda.
Conclusion: It’s really cool to travel the world and bring cymbals to people. It’s absurdly impractical, and why not do it. I want to extend a big thank you to everyone who came, to Michael for promoting it, hosting it, and generally making it possible, and to the other teachers, Sebastian, Andre, and Heinrich, my man Jakob in Bavaria who sent us some good gentian schnapps, and Joshua, Tilman, Stefan, and all the other friends, players and students who came to hang.
Tip o’ the chapeau as well to Gaffel Haus, Ost-West Oase, Boğaziçi kebap emporium, the tapas and Czech beer places in Arminius-Markthalle, Liquidrom, our Polish Flix bus driver whose techno soundtrack made the jetlagged night time Dresden-Berlin run pass so smoothly, and of course the eternal Friedrichstraße bahnhof Dunkin’ Donuts. We saw too little of all of you.
Good times. And if you’re in Germany and missed the boat this time, I’m planning on coming back with a few more cymbals in April ’26, to show them around at JazzAhead in Bremen, so… save your pfennige.
The entire trip was also interesting just from an ease-of-travel perspective, including our non-cymbal business time in Italy— I’ll talk about that in another post.