Howell (Jack Howell)

Howell is the one-man handmade pipe workshop run by American musician Jack Howell in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pipe making is not Howell's primary profession: since 2015 he has served as principal bass clarinetist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and he also teaches clarinet at Duquesne University. The workshop therefore does not run continuously but works in the gaps left by the concert calendar; production volume rises and falls along with that schedule.

From Music to Pipes

Howell is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado; he has served as principal clarinetist of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and has played with the Santa Fe Opera and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Since 1996 he has taught clarinet and chamber music at Duquesne University's Mary Pappert School of Music. Before pipe making, he had also worked in other handcraft fields: knife making and bamboo fly-rod making chief among them, and he has written a book on bamboo rod making. The fact that clarinet playing requires carving one's own reeds appears to have fed a habit of working with fine hand tools.

He began making pipes in 1999 and sold his first pipe in 2004. During the same period he attended the Chicago and Columbus pipe shows and became known in the online pipe communities of the time. By his own account, his output ran for a while at around fifty pipes a year; after joining the orchestra's roster it turned into a largely commission- based and infrequent production, a figure with no independent record. In the long stretches when the concert calendar clears, the pace at the workshop rises again.