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Today's Birthdays
Ivor Mairants, London has closed
BillDaCostaWilliams
Barreiro, Portugal✭✭✭ Altamira M01F, Huttl, 8 mandolins
I was in the UK and passing through London yesterday and decided to make my usual pilgrimage to Ivor Mairants to check out their guitars.
Sadly I found it closed its doors last Saturday. A shame as it had the best selection of archtops, flattop acoustics and gypsy jazz guitars in central London.
Comments
Hi Bill!
I remember I went there years ago to meet Ivor and play some tunes with a friend on some of the many guitars they had. It's a pity!
Was that when you and I went there?
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
Yes Sir, that’s it!
It is sad to see it go - they had a good closing down sale as well, if only you had been there a few days before ... Denmark Street is still clinging on but a lot of its character has been lost since the building works on the tube station which has pretty much closed one side of the street. Provincial guitar shops are closing all over the country.
Another great store is closing in a few days - this one in Paris. Perhaps it's not a music store, but I don't get much time to play (the irony of building is that every good one I've ever met got into building because they wanted to make a better instrument to PLAY, lol.) so authors are often my band now, and they accompany my builds through audiobooks.
My band, most recently, consists of Craig Johnson and C.S. Forester trading solos, with vocalist Donna Leon, and the fantastic rhythm section of Leo Tolstoy on rhythm guitar and Gerald Murnane on upright bass.
Here's a thanks to Ivor Mairants and Pont Traverse'.
I didn't know you were such a renaissance man Bob but putting Leo in the supporting role...ouch!
Haha, I didn't think of that. I was thinking of adventure up front as soloists, and Leon writes so lyrically. Then a solid rhythm section - Tolstoy and Murnane both use time so well, but differently. Tolstoy is rock-solid whereas Murnane's stream of bite-sized vignettes sometimes feels like a walking bass. But then again, it goes in waves of listening to mostly music - I'm sort of on a straight-ahead kick at the moment. Or maybe I'm spending too much time naval gazing and reading and eating over the holidays ;-)
Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah & all that.
Fun fact: Ivor Mairants, the guy who opened this shop, was a contemporary of Django and met him in person. He wrote about this in his excellent two-volume book series "The Great Jazz Guitarists" (recommended!).
Ivor Mairants told me he was sitting next to Django on one occasion and Django pick up a guitar and started playing wonderful music that “seemed to come from nowhere”. Having said that, he was not a particular fan of Django. He seemed to much prefer Eddie Lang and Teddy Bunn.
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
I'm heading up to London next week, is there anywhere else in London that stocks (particularly used) gypsy jazz guitars?
Best wishes
Steven