For The Love of It – Crafting Violins

Joe Rashid made his first violin in 1933. Not a bad year, if you overlook the Depression. That was violin No. 1. He built his most recent fiddle, violin No. 95, in late 2004, in time to play for his 95th birthday.

A violin for every year of his life, like so many rings of a heritage tree. He holds and turns No. 95 in his hands. He admires its shape, its grace, its inner workings.

“This is my favorite,” says Rashid, tucking the instrument under his chin, closing his eyes in a dreamy embrace. Such a Solomonic dilemma. How can a father favor one child?

“I’d rather play this one over any of the others,” he says. “The workmanship is not the same (as with its earlier siblings), but the tone doesn’t suffer. It turned out well.”

Rashid, at 95, still owns all his abilities.

He also possesses all his violins, 1 to 95.

Here they are, tout ensemble, in his music room, most dangling by their scrolled necks in a cabinet, back to front, in precise alignment, in perfect tune, all glowing like glazed ducks in a market window.

It’s an amazing collection. Each violin – golden, nubile, mellowing – has a small dot of tape on its body with its number written in ink. They’re arranged in chronological order.

“The second was fair,” says Rashid of No. 2. “The third was good. But the fourth was the best!” He shakes his head, marveling. “And it’s still the best. Everyone wants to buy No. 4.”

But No. 4 is not for sale.

In fact, none of his violins is for sale. Rashid would sooner sell one of his own children – he has three, all enchanted, if a bit mystified by their redoubtable father – than part with one of his precious violins. Throughout his long life, the instruments alone have been his true companions, ever faithful, always responsive.

The instruments are good, if not excellent, which is remarkable because Rashid, the musical equivalent of an outsider artist, is completely self-taught. He is an aeronautical engineer by profession, not a luthier. But finicky concertmasters praise the instruments.

“They sing,” says LeRoy Peterson, a professor of violin at Pacific Union College in Angwin. “His are very natural-sounding. It’s not just how the violin sounds, but how it feels. They’re even, well-balanced. They are not unlike a person, someone who is well-rounded in every aspect of life.”

He is speaking of the instruments.

But how to explain their maker, who is mulish, passionate, dedicated to his task, a nonagenerian in adolescent pursuit of a magnificent obsession.

The perfect violin.

Maybe No. 96.

It’s mid-afternoon on a recent Sunday. He is sitting at his dining-room table in his home in Nevada City. He lives alone. Just Rashid and 95 violins, four violas and the chatter of his tools.

Rashid is a trim 135 pounds. His frame is a bit stooped, but not his purpose. He is wearing tan slacks, a striped wool shirt. He has a cleaver nose, a self-deprecating wit, a granite will. He sits in a patch of warm sunlight. His wispy hair is like a frayed halo. His hands – the skin parchment, the backs sorely bruised – are clasped idly in his lap.

Despite his age and bachelor status (he is long divorced), Rashid’s house is neat. The floor is swept, the dishes racked on the counter.

After two cataract surgeries, his blue eyes are twinkling again. He continues to drive. Outside, one notices a ladder set up. Rashid was on his roof this winter inspecting his chimney. He cooks all his own meals.

Facing one corner, there’s a music stand, with “L’Abeille,” a piece by Franz Schubert for violin.

Asked about making violins, he cries, “I love it! All my life, I’ve loved it. But now especially. The first thing I do every morning is go into my shop. I check to see what I was doing the day before. And, before you know it, it’s time for lunch.”

Rashid was born in Little Current, northern Ontario. His father, a watchmaker, was an immigrant from Damascus, his mother from Beirut.

“My father used to make flutes from bamboo,” he says. “I think I inherited my love of music from him.”

At 16, living in Windsor, on the Canadian border across from Detroit, Rashid had his first violin lesson; it cost 85 cents. Then, as now, he was an avid but workmanlike player. Later, he took up boxing and went to a trade school to learn tool-making.

He saved his money and enrolled at the University of Detroit. In 1932, he earned a degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1933, watching a cabinetmaker construct a violin from scratch, he made one himself. During the war, he worked at the Ford Motor plant making engines for tanks destined for North Africa.

He married a viola player and the couple moved in 1949 to Long Beach, where Rashid got a job with Northrop. Until his retirement, he gladly designed tools, plane parts, jet-age mechanisms. And violins.

In 1981, restless, retired, divorced (a custody dispute over a viola remains a sore point), he moved to this house in Nevada City. By day, he works on his violins, finishing one every few years. At night, he plays them, working his way through his ensemble.

According to the Violin Society of America, there are approximately 350 violin makers in the United States. A professional-quality violin starts at around $10,000 and goes stratospheric from there.

There are several medal-winning violin-makers living in Northern California, notably Tom Croen in Pleasanton, Joe Grubaugh in Petaluma and John Harrison in Redding.

“He’s somewhat eccentric,” says Harrison of Rashid. “I don’t know that much about him. But he came up to visit the shop once. I’ve never seen any of his violins, so I can’t comment on their quality. But he sure had some interesting stories to tell.”

William Barbini is a well-known violinist and former concertmaster of the Sacramento Symphony. He lives in Davis and continues to perform for orchestras in the Bay Area. He knows Rashid quite well and has made numerous trips to Nevada City to chat with him and sample his banquet of instruments.

“I wouldn’t call him an amateur violin maker,” Barbini says. “No, definitely not. In fact, they’re about as good as you get with contemporary fiddles. They have a nice, almost transparent varnish. They’re beautifully carved, and they sound beautiful. They’re not all consistently great, but some of them are phenomenal.”

Barbini says he used to borrow one of Rashid’s violas to play in the Sacramento Symphony. As if savoring a bottle of fine Bordeaux, he recalls the viola’s sumptuous sound as being “mind-boggling.”

In further considering the curious, solitary figure of Rashid, Barbini says: “Some musicians are not motivated to perform in front of people. They only play for themselves. I think he is trying to improve the art form (of violin making), not to make money.”

Carol Draper is Rashid’s daughter (he also has two sons). A nurse, she lives in Reno and maintains a close watch over her father’s security and welfare.

“Growing up, there was always the smell of varnish and wood,” she says. “My father was always in his shop working on his fiddles.”

Like so many others, Draper is moved by her father’s sustaining love affair with the violin.

“He’s very much a perfectionist,” she says. “He wants to do things in the absolute right way. He wants the right varnish. He wants the exact proportions of the Old Masters. He takes a very objective approach to making violins. Yes, he does like the mechanics, but he also loves the music.”

Ultimately, in accounting for the carved timeline of No. 1 to No. 95, she says, “it’s almost like a diary. He can pick up one of his violins and find out what happened that year, what he was doing. They represent a huge chunk of his life. He put in a lot of love and effort into those instruments. They’re like his family.”

Maybe more prized than his real family?

She laughs. “I’m not going to answer that question.”

Rashid happily leads a tour of his shop, which is located off the garage. Even with sunlight pouring through a window, the place is cool, quiet.

Everything is tidy, precise. He strokes his custom-designed router, pats his ingenious drill press. There is a pegboard of clamps, chisels and an array of hand tools. He displays a palm full of tiny, hand-made planes, which resemble pencil sharpeners.

He opens a wooden chest and reveals a concoction of turpentine, linseed oil, rosin. The secret recipe for violin varnish, from a cookbook in Cremona that goes back centuries.

And, racked on a bottom shelf, there are planks of hard, blond wood. He shows you a slab of spruce, harvested from some forest in Europe, probably in Bosnia. In a neat cursive, in pencil, it reads, “Metropolitan Music, NYC. March 28, 1973.”

Here are the makings of No. 96, 97, 98…

“Yes,” he says, humble, of breathing life into a block of wood. “It makes me feel good. If I can make them right, odds are they are going to sound good.”

Later, one imagines Rashid retreating to the comfort of his music room, his sanctuary, his concert hall. He sits down in a chair. He nods to the waiting players. The violins explode to life, old No. 4 soaring above, through the roof, on an angel’s flight.