One late morning this fall, a man came into the workshop. behind John Weir's house in Toronto, with an unusual humidity-controlled suitcase.
Weir, sitting at his workbench, immediately knew who it was. This man was one of the best clarinetists in the country. He opened the suitcase and handed Weir a B-flat clarinet, hinge by hinge, made by the world-class Parisian company Buffet Crampon.
“I have terrible water problems,” said clarinetist Kimball Sykes. “I don't know what can be done.”
Sykes has had concerts with the National Arts Center Orchestra, where he holds the coveted position of Principal Clarinetist. That morning he traveled to Toronto from Ottawa for this meeting.
Weir turned the clarinet in his hands. “Yes,” he said absently, as if he had already devoted himself to this task.
Inside a clarinet repair shop.
Lance McMillan/Toronto StarAt 71, Weir has spent the last 50 years working on clarinets and saxophones for professionals in leading orchestras, jazz groups, schools and military bands throughout North America. He is one of the few experts in the country that a leading clarinetist like Sykes trusts with his instrument.
In the workshop on Danforth Avenue, Weir got to work. For Sykes, it was a six-month tune-up: tightening up the mechanics, replacing and reshaping pieces of cork, checking the tightness of the metal key pads in contact with the wooden tone holes. He took a piece of paraffin wax, placed it on the tip of a palette knife and hung it over an old glass Bunsen burner.
Once the wax was melted, he ran a palette knife over a piece of cork, sealing it with wax. He used a syringe filled with red oil to lubricate the keys, but refused to say what kind of oil it was.
“It’s actually a proprietary technology,” he said, hunched over his workbench. He has a deep, lyrical delivery, like O'Malley the alley cat.
About an hour later, Weir approached Sykes with a water problem. The problem started with hot breath. Moisture from breathing condenses inside the instrument and can flow to an unnecessary place.
“You'll hear a gurgling sound,” Sykes said.
Over time, the water will establish a trail, directing moisture to the same place. Without treatment, the gurgling never stops.
“It's very concerning,” Sykes said.
“I think I need to run some oil through the top joint,” Weir told him. “Just to see if we can get the water down the horn.”
It sounded like a throwaway idea, but the oil trick was part of Weir's proven anti-gurgling scheme. He has been repairing clarinets and saxophones since about 1975, and at one time also made instruments, including his own line of clarinets. In the 1980s, he became a maintenance assistant for a group of well-known jazz musicians in Toronto, including saxophonist Pat LaBarbera.
Canadian jazz legend Moe Coffman once advised Weir to become a “trusted guy” in the industry – and that's pretty much what happened. Major jazz acts passing through Toronto ended up knocking on his shop's door asking for urgent repairs, including Zoot Sims, Bob Berg, Lee Konitz and Wayne Shorter.
“Once you do that, you get into a really cool club,” Weir said.
A bass clarinet on John Weir's workbench in his 200-square-foot workshop on Danforth Avenue.
Lance McMillan / Toronto Star
For the past 20 years or so, Weir and his wife, accomplished clarinetist Patti Goodwin, have operated a clarinet sales and repair business out of a shop on the Danforth. The storefront is gone and the business is almost done. Weir just can't stop fixing things. (He also books jazz shows for Hirut Cafe, the Ethiopian restaurant next door.)
His 200-square-foot backyard workshop is cluttered with equipment, tiny drawers for instrument parts, plastic bins containing clarinet barrels, and on the floor is an assortment of cased instruments, mostly belonging to orchestra professionals from across the province, all awaiting Weir's attention.
“It’s hard for me to say no,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m 71 years old and I need to open my eyes a little.”
As Weir was working on Sykes' B-flat clarinet, there was another knock on the door. It was a 26-year-old clarinetist from California named Johnny Wang. This year he won a place in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He auditioned in the preliminary round, then in the semi-finals and final. Each time he performed behind the scenes so that the judges did not know who was playing. The orchestra laid out a carpet to muffle the candidate's footsteps so that the judges could not draw any conclusions from the type of heel the performer was wearing.
Van was just testing out two new Buffet clarinets that Weir had helped him tune.
Vahn knew Weir by reputation long before he met him. When Wang was studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, his professor told him about a guy in Toronto who made his own clarinet parts, specifically drums. Van started buying them. After high school, he played in orchestras all over the United States and had to take a five-hour train ride to find a decent clarinet repairman. In Toronto, Weir was within walking distance.
“So you played your horns?” — Weir asked Wang carefully.
The first days of a new clarinet are critical. You can't play too little or too much to allow the wood to acclimate. But Wang was in the middle of the symphony's grueling fall schedule and had little time.
“Try to stay steady on them,” Weir ordered.
“I will do my best,” Wang said.
Weir smiled. “This is the correct answer.”
Neither man said it out loud, but Van's new clarinets were in danger. If the clarinet breaks (Weir estimates about half of them do), it will most likely happen during their first year.
After Van left, Weir ran his finger over the barely visible scar on Sykes' B-flat clarinet.
“This instrument is broken,” he said. “You can see where I stuck it.”
After the crack, Weir drilled small holes around the crack and then repaired it with pieces of threaded rod.
Sykes recalled the ordeal with sadness.
Tool made fromrenadilla wood, retail price about $13,500. In orchestras, clarinettists typically rely on two main instruments: one in B-flat, which is often the workhorse, and the other in A.
“If I play for a few more years, I’m not sure B-flat will work,” Sykes admitted to Weir. “It’s starting to feel like things are changing.”
“You kind of seize the moment,” John Weir says of his work as a clarinet technician, “and do what you can with that moment.”
Lance McMillan / Toronto Star
Clarinets are not like violins. They don't live for centuries. Fluctuations from hot to cold, wet to dry eventually catch up with the wood. When a clarinet dies, it is sometimes called extinct. Weir has spent his life so close to this truth, watching beautiful things fall apart, that he thinks of his legacy as something happening right now, in the present, in someone else's hands.
“You kind of seize the moment,” he said, “and do what you can with that moment.”
That morning in the workshop, Weir finished his work and returned the clarinet to Sykes.
Sykes took out a cane, rolled it in his mouth, attached it to the clarinet, and then began playing selections from Weber, Mozart and Kodály, including the “Dances of Galanta,” which his orchestra was performing the following week.
As he played, his face changed. The muscles of the cheeks and chin, which had previously been dormant, now tensed, and the blood rushed upward. It suddenly became clear that this nondescript man, who had been conducting a quiet conversation for more than an hour, possessed secret, exquisite magic.
He stopped playing and was silent for a while.
“He seems a little tougher,” Sykes said.
With nothing to do, he turned his attention to the next clarinet.
Cool Jobs is a regular series of profiles of Toronto residents who have mastered unusual and noteworthy professions.
