I’m driving on Spring Street in downtown Little Rock, near Sixth Street, and it’s a quiet weekend day. As I pass one of the old brick storefronts with office furnishings visible through large glass windows, I slow down and listen. It’s nothing but ambient traffic and Sunday wind out there, but my imagination adds a sound-cloud of brass and strings, the tunings of first violins, the almost imperceptible shimmer of crash cymbals reacting to hard evening sunlight in the windows and the vibes of a busy room.
Just a few years ago, the wall on the north side of this building still had “Bean Music Company” painted on it, high up, in the classic style. But now that wall is just painted brick, reddish and partially eclipsed by a parking deck on-ramp.
The scene was different in the late 1970s when I came to this same spot as a 9-year-old in a back seat. On that day, the already-established band-instrument company was well into a 30-year stewardship under Benjamin and Mildred Ford as I walked into a dissonant swirl of clarinet lessons and labored trumpet debuts.
An older man talked to my mom briefly, walked away, then came back with a violin case and opened it. An organic smell introduced me to the instrument inside. He asked me to hold it, asked me how it felt. It felt pretty neat. There was weird dust on it, under the strings. He showed me the bow and the block of rosin. He showed me how to tighten and rosin the bow, then showed me how to hold all this stuff by holding it himself. I saw the rosin dust falling off of the bow and onto the violin as he made the first real bowed tone I had ever heard so close to my ears. My brother was nearby, adding to the musical swirl as he blasted out his first notes on a cornet.
I left that day with that violin, and for the next few months I would take it to Pinewood Elementary School in Jacksonville, where I would join other kids in a large custodial storeroom for lessons with Jim Hatch — Little Rock’s resident double-bass master and a longtime member of the Arkansas Sympony Orchestra — as he worked to arrange this little cluster of confused fingers into something listenable.
Mr. Hatch, known for his years of dedication to musical outreach in central Arkansas, was starting our little group from scratch. Correcting our body positions, chalking up “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and the musical staff on the board and putting colored tape on the fingerboards to help us find the notes, that Mr. Hatch had a big job on his hands. But soon, he had us playing “Mary had a Little Lamb” on an endless loop, reverberating against cinderblocks and jugs of floor polish.
Some in there really had skill. Troy Rinker, himself now a double-bass master, was in there, too, learning the instrument that he had to lug onto the bed of a pickup truck to and from school; he would move on to playing in the ASO by age 15 and then to larger cities and world-class musical performances today.
For me, life as a musical prodigy didn’t begin in that storeroom. And it was my second try. Back in the first grade, I arrived one morning at school in San Antonio, Texas, with a bone-white recorder that my mom had mysteriously introduced to my going-to-school things. I took the recorder out of its velvety bag on the playground and discovered that I could play virtually anything on it, just by thinking of it. My fingers magically found the notes, and I had all of my first-grade class amazed. I was impressed, too — until later that day when the recorder instructor crushed me with the news that humming into the thing wasn’t allowed.
But to the credit of what music programs aim to teach — music appreciation, how to listen, perhaps even, someday, to PLAY something — that round with Mr. Hatch and his little orchestra struck a chord.
Within just a few years I was studying guitar and piano, and later even managed a couple of semesters on the guitar in the University of Central Arkansas Jazz II band. These days I am surrounded in my home office by several cherished guitars and other instruments — bass, mandolin, banjo, keyboards and yes, even a couple of violins — that I’ve collected and dabbled on over the years with enough proficiency that I can call myself a musician without any kind of identity crisis about it. A hobbyist, sure, but one with at least the materials and skill needed to lay down the occasional soundtrack for a work video or hold my own in most impromptu porch jams.
So now, 37 years later, when I’m on Spring Street on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I remember the sounds that started it all, and make myself believe that the walls inside are still alive with their last echoes.