photo credit: Lauren Spates
Jason Cool at the library.

A new library has opened up in Monte Rio, but the items on loan take up a bit more space and make a bit more noise than your average library book.

That’s because this library is the Musical Instrument Library, a shop where borrowers can take home any one of hundreds of instruments. From mainstream western options including guitars, banjos, trumpets and violins, to global choices including a west Asian bouzouki or the double-reeded mizmar from Egypt. 

According to owner Jason Cool, borrowing from his library requires providing information from your driver’s license. There are no fees involved, and the borrowing period can last weeks. 

“I have people from kids to seniors that have always wanted to try something or are just experimenting for the first time,” Cool said. “The family comes with their kid, and it's going to be, ‘Oh, the kid's going to be exposed to instruments,’ and then it winds up being a family jam instead. So it's one of those things that really it's beautiful how many people are into music and enthusiasts of music, and you know, really appreciate it.”

Lifelong musician Sarah Comey Cluff borrowed a Tex-Mex accordion, an instrument she said she’d never tried before, but one that she and her child both ‘coveted,’ she said.

“I just really appreciate this mission, because even renting an instrument, while inexpensive, is a barrier for many people,” Comey Cluff said. “There are so many barriers that people put up between themselves and music that just anything that allows an easier, freer, kind of lighter relationship and entry point is so welcome.” she said.

That low barrier to entry is — pardon the pun — music to Robbie Harris’s ears. A classically trained pianist who began lessons at age four, Harris said he fell out with his piano years ago and only recently felt the pull of musicianship again. 

It was while visiting the library when Harris sat down in front of a piano and played for over an hour, then later borrowed a mountain dulcimer—that’s a three- or four-stringed instrument played in Appalachia—and then a McNally Strumstick in D Major, followed by a banjo. Options abound.

“The banjo, I'm not feeling it,” Harris said. “So as happy as it is, and as much as I enjoy it, it's hella heavy; it's a little much…it doesn't have a strap, it's not the easiest to lug around. And I want something that was as easy as that little strum stick…I thinking more in the lines of a mandolin.”

Individual borrowing aside, Cool says has big plans for the library. His goal, he says, is to scale the operation globally. 

“The big picture is that, once we have [libraries] around the world, if you want to learn bagpipe, we'll just send you over to Ireland, and you can learn or Scotland, or wherever you want to learn a bagpipe, Galicia, Spain, we'll send you there, and you can learn traditional music,” Cool said.

Until then, Harris recommends everyone take a trip to Monte Rio.

“For the people driving past the musical instrument library, I suggest to them that they work past their apprehension and go check out the instrument that they've been wanting to learn, that the child version of them, their child, their inner child, wanted them to learn, that they never got a chance to just go get it,” Harris said. “There's no commitment to getting one of those instruments. You can have it for a day. You can have it for a week. Just go try it. It might change your life, and it will make you new friends, and who knows where it'll bring you.”