POST January/February 2015

“I got a banjo in 1972 because I saw
it in a window and wanted to play
the banjo,” recalls John Bernunzio, owner
of Bernunzio Uptown Music in Rochester’s
East End. “I was 24 years old. It was a piece
of junk and didn’t sound good, nothing like the
instruments I heard on records, so I went on a
quest to find that early sound.”
That quest has led to a career as an
instrument historian, sought after by musicians
around the world who trust his knowledge and
advice on new, refurbished and vintage banjos,
guitars, mandolins and other pieces. He has
sold more than 40,000 instruments in the 40
years he has been in business, and his inventory
holds close to 1,000 instruments, in addition to
accessories, records, and other music-related
items. (An original Bill Haley & The Comets
“Rock-A-Round the Clock” LP signed by every
member of the band has a price tag
of $450.)
He has handled the sale of guitars up
to $300,000 and banjos up to $75,000. The
rarest guitar he ever saw was the Martin D-45,
a steel-string acoustic guitar, the first of which
was made for singing cowboy Gene Autry
at his request in 1933. (Bernunzio fell in love
with music by listening to Autry on the radio
“like every kid in the ’50s.”) “We’ve been lucky
enough to sell two of them over the years,” he
says. “They command at least $250,000.”
But value is in the eye of the beholder. “In
terms of value, something has to be rare but it
also has to be desirable,” Bernunzio explains.
“A lot of things are rare, but if nobody wants
them, they just languish.”
Living one mile from the store, situated
spitting distance from the Eastman School of
Music, the self-taught Bernunzio “tinkers” with
the mandolin and banjo. He eventually found the
sound he was searching for in his mid-20s, but
at the time money was too tight to own it. These
days, he has exact replicas of those banjos he
was pursuing produced for him by the Eastman
Music Co. (no relation to our local Eastman
school).
Bernunzio, who runs his shop with wife
Julie Schnepf, specializes in banjos made
between 1900 and 1935, sending them to
customers as far away as Australia, South Africa
and China. “The craftsmanship that existed
100 years ago was certainly the finest time of
American instruments,” he says. “The selection
of wood and ornamentation was beyond
anything that had existed before in this country.”
Manufacturing changed as a result of World War
II, however, catering to more mass markets. Yet
wood from that era does season to a certain
degree as time passes, offering a bit of a better
sound, he adds.
People buy vintage instruments, which
account for nearly half of the store’s inventory,
for various reasons—some sentimental, some
for the thrill of the hunt.
On one visit while in town, guitarist,
composer and arranger Bill Frisell spotted—and
purchased—a 1964 Fender Musicmaster guitar
because it was the first guitar he’d ever played.
Collectors come at it from another angle,
perhaps wanting an instrument in as many
different styles and from as many different years
as possible from one particular manufacturer.
Bernunzio helps people build collections,
and was responsible for providing a good
portion of the banjos represented in Akira
Tsumura’s 904-page “One Thousand and
One Banjos: The Tsumura Collection,” which
has been referred to as “banjo porn.” When
Tsumura ran into financial trouble in the late
’90s, Bernunzio bought back much of the
collection he helped create.
The store sponsors weekly jam sessions,
works with music teachers to run clinics
on weekends, and hosts five or six free
performances every month. It was a venue for
the First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival, and
has free concerts with local musicians every
night during the Xerox Rochester International
Jazz Festival. Sometimes musicians in town
on a tour might want a more intimate setting
outside their scheduled performance venue,
so they pop in for a set. American jazz guitarist
Howard Alden did that recently.
Those shows give serious listeners what
they want.
“They’re there just to hear music,”
Bernunzio says. “Not to find a girlfriend, or to
get drunk, or to have an espresso. Just to hear
music unadulterated.”
—Robin L. Flanigan
Matt Calabrese
Issue 9 January / February 2015 | POST 45