From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Published Monday, May. 16, 2011 4:37PM EDT
Father, grandfather, fisherman, jazz musician. Born May 2, 1937, in Hamilton. Died Oct. 13, 2010, in Fredericton of heart disease, aged 73.
Hans Martini found a new life after retirement, and, like everything, he embraced it with passion.
Hans was a passionate father. He was a single dad to his sons, Scott and Calvin, for many years after he and his first wife, Carole, divorced in 1979. Hans and a friend, Jon, who also suddenly found himself single with two sons, decided to be uncles to each other’s boys. This involved daily visits and elaborate Sunday dinners that took hours to prepare but were devoured in minutes by four growing boys.
Hans was passionate about music, and was among the lucky ones who got to do what he loved as a profession. After studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, he joined the RCAF Air Transport Command Band so that he could play music while he raised his family. It was a calling for Hans, and he often recalled how, as a three-year-old on his tricycle, he would follow bands down the streets of Hamilton as they accompanied soldiers going off to war.
Hans became a renowned sax player who, as his friend Jon put it, spoke a language that could melt hearts. Jazz was his passion. He was also passionate about sharing and teaching music and he inspired many students. He was delighted to discover, a decade ago, that a former student had named her daughter Hannah, after him. He attended many of his students’ weddings. One student, who later became a gigging partner, called Hans “our man, a super-generous leader, teacher, repairman and gear provider.”
Hans played in military bands for 33 years, ending his career based in Oromocto, N.B. In retirement in Fredericton, he still frequently performed live, and built a steady business repairing musical instruments and teaching at his studio, Woodshed Sound. A picture of him playing his sax can be seen in many New Brunswick tourism brochures.
Hans loved to fish, build model railways and smoke his pipe. He remarried 13 years ago, and embraced life with his second wife and her family. At 60, he found himself with a new mother-in-law, something few men wish for in their later years, but he doted on her as if she were his own mother.
His last six months, following bypass surgery, were difficult. But he kept on living with passion, even if he couldn’t venture farther than the front porch of his house, where he would watch people come and go as he considered his blessings. First among those were his sons, now grown and starting their own families, and a third child – a daughter he never knew he had until she, as an adult, found him nine years ago. He embraced them all, and they gave him what he wanted most: grandchildren. He always said he was born to be a grandfather, and that’s what he was on the day he died.
By Janet Crawford, Hans’s second wife.
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