The Bass with Surprising Lineage

Weisner with his rescued Jacquet bass.

Double bassist Jeffrey Weisner was on tour with the National Symphony Orchestra several years ago when he found himself in Bob Beerman's Bass Violin Shop in Greensboro, N.C.

Though Weisner loved the colonial-era Abraham Prescott he'd owned since he was 18, he was in the market for a second bass. He was intrigued by what he found: "It was a French instrument," he recalls. "It looked like it was very nice, but it was in terrible shape. It looked like someone had taken an awl and punched and scraped it." Inside, things were worse: the bass bar was cracked.

Weisner learned that the instrument had been brought in recently by a man who had acquired it in a swap for a TV set. He'd been playing bluegrass on it; and apparently, to get to gigs, he had been strapping it to the roof of his car (hence some of the scrapes).

Beerman had recognized a good thing when he saw it, so he had paid the bluegrass player $200, then immediately looked the instrument up on the stolen bass registry. It turned out that the early 20th century Xavier Jacquet had belonged to Orin O'Brien of the New York Philharmonic. "She was one of the first women to play bass in a major symphony orchestra," notes Weisner.

Beerman learned that O'Brien had owned the bass since the 1970s and would occasionally lend it to students for performances and auditions. Around 2000, one such student had taken it to an audition for the San Diego Symphony—and it was stolen from a hotel room. When it remained missing for a year, the insurance company paid O'Brien the value of the bass.

Beerman had contacted the insurance company; they had called O'Brien to let her know the bass had been found. She told them to keep it; she had already spent the money. So the company had, that very day, called Beerman back: it wanted its Jacquet double bass. The company was already making arrangements in New York City for the bass to be refurbished and resold.

Weisner had to act fast. "I stayed all day with [Beerman], negotiating with the insurance company through him," he says. The rest of the NSO left on their charter bus; Weisner stayed behind. An agreement was reached, and the bass was brought to Baltimore, and then to a master luthier in Montreal where it spent almost half a year being repaired.

"I got in touch with Orin O'Brien, and she was thrilled," Weisner says. "She said it was great that it was going to be played. She sent me all the [bass's] papers from the 1970s."

Now Weisner plays his Jacquet all the time. "I have a much better sense of what I sound like on it" than the Prescott, he says of the "zippier" sounding French bass, which is smaller than his large, dark-sounding American bass. And though the Prescott has "certain quirks," he says, "having this second bass makes me appreciate the Prescott in new ways."