Parallels in New Waves (Part One)

[Bear Graves]

My humble company has recently acquired an estate collection that contains many pipes from up-and-coming stars of the German pipe scene. Naturally, we also often feature work from their American counterparts. As I have been critiquing pipe after pipe, many parallels are becoming apparent to me and I wanted get some observations out and take yours in.

The waves, as I call them started pretty close to the same time, the very late 90's/early 2000's. With the Americans, it was the rise in popularity of Larry Roush, Jody Davis and Todd Johnson pipes that seemed to be a catalyst, in Germany it was Cornelius Maenz. Since then, young lions such Frank Axmacher, Jurgen Moritz and Peter Klein have emerged in Germany, Jeff Gracik, Brad Pohlmann, Rad Davis and, as of late, Alex Florov* and Adam Davidson have become forces to be reckoned with (please note, this isn't anywhere near a full list on either side, merely examples).

In both waves, the carvers set out to craft with extreme quality in mind, not simply making a living by cranking out volume. Both sides initially sought advice from deans within their own country and many then entered a type of 'grad school' with a Dane of great note. The Yank's shaping started out (one remained) with the neo-Northern Italian school of Mike Butera, then took on a good deal of Danish influence and finally are now arriving at an ephemeral aesthetic that I started to think of as "American neo-classical". The Germans started showing influences of carvers such as Safferling, Barbi, Wolfgang Becker and Austrian Peter Matzhold, then Danish nuances became apparent and now an ephemeral aesthetic, let's call it "German New Wave", seems to to be in play.

(to be continued, evidently 15750 characters are the max for a post)

[Blaylock]

Interesting info.

Just a suggestion...You could have added another post to this one for the second part, rather than start a new thread for 'part 2'.

If you want, I can merge the two threads together for you (just makes it easier to follow)...if not, no problem.

[Bear Graves]

My apologies for the late reply. We had lightening affect our servers last night. Thankfully, it didn't interfere with the site being up, just shut down phones, our ability to access the net, our interior network (in, short, our ability to work). If you could merge this into one thread, I would be much obliged.

Bear