by Caroline Gabsewics
Staff Writer
Surrounded by stacks of cypress lumber, a professional French string quartet played a few well-known ragtime songs for a very small crowd, but this performance wasn’t for entertainment. It was a prelude to a new business deal between Jacksonville’s Cypress Lumber and France.
The odd pairing of the French Le Quatuor Liger and Cypress Lumber in Talleyrand came when the Jacksonville Sister City Association contacted Cypress Lumber owner Bill Kavanaugh about having the quartet out to the lumber yard to help build a relationship between the French port city of Nantes and his company.
“We were contacted by the association because they want to help build the relationship between us and the port city,” said Kavanaugh. “I thought they would play with the symphony or at other venues — they seem more logical — but they wanted to play here and it’s a lumber yard.”
Kavanaugh said his company is in the early stages of exporting Cypress Lumber to Nantes.
“They are very interested in cypress,” he said. “We are exploring the opportunities to export the lumber to France.”
Currently, Cypress Lumber is exporting their materials to countries in southeast Asia, areas of the Caribbean and India.
“Cypress is a special species of wood, it has a lot of history in it and it is romantic,” he said. “People buy it because they love the way it looks.”
Many historic homes in the U.S. were made of cypress. Kavanaugh said because homes were built with cypress many of them are still standing today.
“Long ago America was full of thick forests, full of the finest trees,” he said. “Heart cypress and heart pine won’t rot and insects won’t eat it.”
Andy Whitaker, Kavanaugh’s director of operations at Florida Cypress, said cypress is now found buried deep in the swamps, mostly in the Florida panhandle.
“The wood is buried in muck and sometimes it has to come out by helicopters or earth moving machinery,” said Whitaker. “It is beautiful wood, holds up well, real easy to work with and it is still good out of the swamp.”
The French quartet was in Jacksonville because the Sister City Association invited them and the rest of the French delegation as a part of the association’s cultural exchange.
“We are combining culture and trade,” said Herrold Jonkers, trade and commerce director of the Jacksonville Sister City Association. “We brought them here to help increase export business.”
Having a performance in the lumber yard was a first for both the quartet and Cypress Lumber.
Henriette Bosseau, the wife of Vasile Comsa — the cellist and translator for the group — said the quartet is not used to playing in venues like a lumber yard.
“It is original and different,” said Comsa, with the help of Bosseau. “Wood is very important to us because all of our instruments are made from wood.”
Bosseau added that since they were playing in the humidity that comes with Florida, they had to tune their instruments differently to make sure they sounded correctly. For about 15 minutes the quartet, that included a cello, two violins and an alto viola, played for a crowd of about 20 in front of stacks of lumber.
Kavanaugh opened Cypress Lumber in 1988 at the same site the company occupies today.
“Now here we are today with a French string quartet,” he said.