My mental/visual of Singapore has been the same since I first saw it years ago and it hasn’t changed. A taxi ride from the airport to mid-city bolts you through a meticulously manicured avenue of lush greenery bordered by an endless row of skyscraper apartment housing complexes. I suddenly feel myself in one of those fighter ships from Star Wars, screaming recklessly through corridors of deep steel canyons (in this case, cement) in the boweled intestines of some enormous starship. It’s a bit unnerving – the endless balustrade of cement and glass on either side of you reminds you of the close conditions millions of Singaporean residents must endure.
(The few pictures we took from through the taxi's window hardly project a sense of it.)
Singapore is notorious for its stringent laws. Caught with a very small amount of drugs means death by hanging. Littering and spitting on the street also carries heavy fines and even imprisonment. Well… when you have an island with an international port, that tightly packed with souls, some extreme measures are probably called for...
I always come away from Singapore with a strong sense of façade – a feeling that I have only seen the neat and carefully tended wrapping on a tightly contained box filled with the same stuff of every other city in the world. I have the impression (right or wrong) that the Chinese are the masters of the cloak. “Inscrutable,” they have been called, and nowhere is it more evident than in the outwardly pristine façade of Singapore.
Our expensive hotel near the airport sported mod and stylishly antiseptic décor, but our room was two notches above Motel 8.
We had a mission, other than getting our reentry stamps. I took my alto sax with me because I found a good repairman in a music store there and its rusted springs needed replacing. Well… the music store’s website, Accent Music, said they carried a particular model Leblanc clarinet that I have eyeballed and read about. It’s the one Eddie Daniels, Kenny Peplowski and a number of other guru players play. I figured those guys must be using that clarinet, Leblanc Concerto II, for a reason and I have been eager to give one a blow, even knowing I couldn’t afford to buy one. Amazingly, Accent Music had two in stock.
The folks at Accent Music are terrific. It’s a pro shop; not your run-of-the-mill gewgaws and gadgets music store. They even carry my bopep flute device! (Well, maybe they carry a couple of gewgaws.) When I told them I was the inventor, I was immediately treated to big smiles and exclamations. They said my gadgets were good sellers and they were very honored to meet me. (Asians are wonderful at making you feel more honored than you deserve.)
I play tested their Leblanc clarinets and they were better than I expected. My older Buffet Festival clarinet is top of the line and much more expensive than the Leblancs, but its voice is better suited to classical work than jazz. I had my Buffet with me, so I could compare its response and sound. The Leblanc was definitely the jazz clarinet I was looking for. I had no idea how much they were asking for the it, but after drinking tea and testing the horns, I told the owner that I might be interested in buying one if the price was right. He disappeared into his office for a bit and then came out with a big smile on his face. He said he would give me the “university discount,” and that would come to around 1, 900 US dollars! Damn… If he had said 2, 900 I would have nodded and walked away to wait for a time when I could afford it, but how in the hell could I refuse the lowest price I had ever heard of for these monster clarinets?
The sale almost didn’t happen… I smiled broadly, thanked him for his generosity and held out my credit card. The look on everyone’s faces told me something bad had just happened. Yep, it had. “So sorry, we don’t take credit cards.” Well that was the beginning of what turned out to be a most interesting, fun and exhausting afternoon.
I really don’t think they needed the sale of that clarinet at that price, but they could see the disappointment on my face and knew I was in love with the horn. Asians are very accommodating people – the most accommodating I’ve ever known – and the owner immediately began looking for alternative ways for me to buy the clarinet. (His marginal profit, after the generous discount, really didn’t warrant this much attention.) First, they took us on a tour of Singapore banks where we tried to get cash on my card, but my US card would only validate a swiped purchase transaction and would not authorize cash. We had some fun getting to see the parts of Singapore we would not have found on our own and, after a flurry of phone calls, the store owner said that he had a friend who owned an optical shop that took credit cards and he was willing to swipe my card for the amount of the sale, so we bundled into the car again and went to a huge inner city shopping mall where my card was charged to a Chinese optician who would turn the money over to the music store owner. (My credit card company thinks I paid an outrageous sum for a pair of glasses.) Their was much laughter, facetious kidding and joviality throughout the afternoon. Tired as we were, we shot through the corridor of traffic back to our hotel with very warm feelings for these people indeed. Teow, Cindy, Danny and a couple of other people at Accent Music are now good friends. Their friendship alone was worth the trip.
So I now play the finest jazz clarinet I’ve ever owned. It has a big sound with a lot of complexity in the overtones and the keys have been reworked to an ergonomically superior configuration that takes some getting used to, but it facilitates technique. It’s easy to see why some of the top players use it.
Our next visa run will be a bit of a palaver(as if none of them haven't), because we will have to renew our one-year visas at that time. We haven’t figured out how to manage it yet, but it will entail a trip to some country with a Thai consulate and a bunch of red tape. The closest possibilities are Malaysia and Cambodia, but each pose problems. Stay tuned.
