There is a little music store on Belmont Ave. in Chicago.  From the outside, it doesn’t look like much.  A giant red sign proclaiming “Andy’s Music” and a couple windows full of beautiful instruments.  It’s small, easy to drive past again and again.

But if you venture inside, you will find the most incredible collection of instruments for sale.  The small front room alone displays banjos, sitars, singing bowls, Middle Eastern percussion, and rows and rows of accessories and necessities for the worldly musician.  You could seriously spend hours in just this one tiny space exploring all the goodies.  And I did spend hours there:

But there’s more.  Walk through the door and you’ll find a wall lined with all kinds of beautiful, unusual flutes.  Graceful harps.  Peruvian panpipes.   Shelves full of accordions.  Rows of sitars and sets of tablas.  And even more than that, you just have to keep your eyes open.

And that’s just the beginning.  Looking for bagpipes?  A ukulele?  Violin?  Electric guitar?  Harpsichord?  Giant gong?  Drum set?  Keyboard?  Jawbone?  Didgeridoo?  They’ve got it.

I started working with Andy last fall to photograph his extensive instrument collection, and am excited to embark on a project to photograph the music store.  Yesterday we did the first official shoot, where we just scratched the surface of the beautiful and diverse collection available at this crazy store.  It is truly a heaven for music geeks or the generally curious.  I am really so excited about this project.  I can’t wait to show you guys the images we get.