Musical Instrument Repair Technician, Cancer Survivor, Rower

Jennifer Nicoletti, who owns Thomas Music Inc. in Rochester, has found a balance between her work life and her health

By Linda Quinlan

 

A musician recently stopped in, saying his saxophone sounded “stuffy.”

Jennifer Nicoletti found a Hot Wheels-style toy car stuck inside.

Another customer, the parent of a child, told her that the child was experimenting with putting different sizes of balls into his baritone horn when one became stuck. The child started banging the bell of the horn on a table to get the ball out. As one might expect, the bell ended up mangled.

Another customer found a sousaphone hanging on the side of a barn and wanted to know if it could be restored.

“We’ve seen it all,” Nicoletti said with a laugh. “It’s like going to the doctor’s office …you might come in a little embarrassed, but we can diagnose the problem and fix it.”

That “we” would be Thomas Music Inc., the company her late father, J. Russell Thomas, founded the year she was born, 1968.

While her father died in May 2019, Nicoletti has not only kept the business going, but also growing. At the same time, she has balanced treatments for a second bout of breast cancer and challenged herself to stay strong by participating in activities through organizations supporting cancer survivors.

At 56, Nicoletti has been diagnosed with and survived, cancer five times since age 20.

Nicoletti has now grown Thomas Music to include two other repair technicians. The three operate out of a large space on East Ridge Road in Irondequoit.

“I think my dad would be extremely proud; we have always had a very strong work ethic,” Nicoletti said.

The reason Russ Thomas started fixing band instruments, she explained, is that as a fairly new music teacher at the East Irondequoit School District’s Ridgewood School in 1963, he became frustrated when a student’s instrument needed repair, that it was often gone for weeks at a time. He could not effectively teach instrumental music when the students did not have their instruments.

He started by learning to do a few adjustments himself, but eventually realized he needed and wanted to know more, she said.

He learned that one of his suppliers, Allied Supply of Wisconsin, was running summer workshops on how to make instrument repairs. So from the time So from was 5 or 6 years old, their family would pile into a camper and “vacation” in Wisconsin. Dad would be at school during the day but come back for dinner and campfires, Nicoletti recalled.

“Those were our big family vacations for a number of years,” she said.

As her father gained more knowledge in the instrument repair business, he also started attending conventions hosted by the same supplier. Out of those conventions grew NAPBIRT, the National Association of Professional Band Instrument Repair Technicians. Her father was a charter member in 1976.

NAPBIRT today is an international organization and Nicoletti and her employees still attend the annual conventions. She was its president in 2010-11.

While she had followed in her parents’ footsteps and attended SUNY Fredonia, Nicoletti earned a degree in sociology with a criminal justice minor. After an internship at a prison south of Buffalo, she decided a career as a corrections officer was not for her. Instead, she said she “fell into” human resources and started working in corporate America.

After several years, “I was becoming continually frustrated,” she recalled.

One day, a simple question — “What about working with your dad?” — from her mother, Kathy Thomas, led her down her current path. It was a lightbulb moment, she said and is grateful her mother put the idea into her head.

Nicoletti had studied piano from an early age and played French horn in concert and marching bands throughout her school years in East Irondequoit but had not considered anything in music as a career before.

She had met her future husband, Dave Nicoletti, an engineer, at a summer job during her college years and the two were married in October 1991. He was incredibly supportive of the switch in careers, she said.

“So, I brought it up to my dad and asked if he thought instrument repair was something I could learn,” she said.

“He had a huge grin on his face,” she added and replied that they had to make sure she had some mechanical aptitude.

It turns out she did.

“He always said I took to it like a duck to water,” Nicoletti said.

He also told her there would be pain involved with this job, since technicians use a lot of sharp and sometimes dangerous tools. She recalls that she told him that would not deter her as she had a high pain tolerance.

Still, she needed a plan, Nicoletti said.

“I knew I’d be taking a cut in a pay while I was starting out in a new career,” she said.

In 1999, she started training in her father’s business. The shop at first was operated out of the family garage on Hartsdale Road in Irondequoit and later out of the basement of the large, historic farmhouse on Portland Avenue that her parents had moved to when her father retired in 1997. Still, Nicoletti continued working full-time. She spent one night a week and Saturday mornings training with her dad. She also took classes through the same supplier her dad had used and at the repair association’s conventions.

After six months, Nicoletti felt ready to take the plunge to leave her full-time job. She continued to work part-time as they were building the business and decided to supplement her income by offering private piano lessons in her home. She taught eight to 10 students after school and had annual recitals at her parents’ Portland Avenue home.

By 2006, the business, which specializes in brass and woodwind instrument repairs, was rapidly growing and she realized she needed to be in the shop more, so she went full-time. A year later, they needed more space and she found Thomas Music’s current home at 1908 E. Ridge Road (behind Vittorio’s Tux Shop).

Nicoletti, her father and her husband did renovations to the building to make it suitable for their needs. The building now includes a reception area, large repair shop, areas for heavy equipment, a room for cleaning instruments and more. Her husband has designed and built some of the diagnostic tools they now use and he sells them to other band instrument repair technicians in the U.S. and around the world.

“Not many people do what we do and there are even fewer who do it well,” Nicoletti said.

Today, they are one of the largest band instrument repair facilities around and do work not only for numerous school districts, but also for a large population of adults who play in numerous community groups throughout the area, students from the Eastman School of Music and a number of other area colleges and even members of the Rochester and Buffalo philharmonic orchestras. They also do subcontract work for a couple of other stores and instrument rental companies who do not have their own repair facilities.

The father-daughter operation added repair technician Byron Ford in 2009, due to business growth.

The pandemic years were rough, Nicoletti said. But grants available to businesses during that time kept them going.

“The only good thing about the pandemic was that there were no ‘emergency’ repairs needed, since no one was performing,” Nicoletti said.

She explained that it is common for someone to come in and need a very quick turnaround, which puts a lot of pressure on a technician.

Three years ago, though, business had picked back up so much that she started looking at adding another technician.

Ironically, Trevor Roberts was hired to join Thomas Music about the same time as her most recent cancer diagnosis.

“It was devastating,” Nicoletti said of the diagnosis. “But I knew what I was in for, to a certain degree.”

She ended up having to be out of work eight weeks, but she did not have to worry about her business because she had Byron and Trevor to take care of things.

“It worked out beautifully because they are so awesome. I knew the shop was in excellent hands and that took a great deal of stress off my shoulders to allow me time to recuperate,” Nicoletti said.

She had three surgeries in 2022.

After her first bout of breast cancer at age 41, Nicoletti had become involved with the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer effort. Her team, called Enough is Enough, ended up being one of the most successful private fundraising teams and she became a spokesperson for Making Strides at several events. She participated for five years but then decided it was time to move on.

The business was her focus.

“We tell people to have their instruments checked every year, so we can find little things before they become big things,” Nicoletti said. She stressed, “Our customers are the best. They are very loyal and so many have become friends. And it is heartwarming when people come in and say they had my dad as a music teacher.”

They continue to find everything from marbles to candy — and even a stuffed animal once — inside instruments.

Ford said there is a lot of precision to what they do, especially with higher end instruments.

Ford was a clarinet major in college and Roberts was a music business major including playing trombone at college. He said he does a lot of trombone alignment.

“I just feel lucky to get in here,” Roberts added. He worked in Buffalo for 13 years before joining Thomas Music and getting a much shorter commute.

Nicoletti did play the French horn in the Irondequoit Concert Band for 11 years, while her father was conducting, but stepped back when she was going through cancer treatments. That was, coincidentally, around the same time he stepped down from conducting the band.

She can play all the instruments they repair, as can Ford and Roberts. All three repair both brass and woodwind instruments.

“You have to know how to play them to learn to fix them properly,” Nicoletti said, adding the only one she does not play is the bassoon.

The shop is open six days a week.

“We are a great team here and we consult with each other,” Nicoletti said.

They also try to be conscientious and get instruments back in the hands of their owners in a reasonable amount of time, she added. They are usually “slammed” in the summer and fall, especially as students and teachers are gearing up to go back to school.

While Thomas Music is not a full-service music store, they are a repair shop, Nicoletti stressed. They do carry a selection of common accessories, such as reeds, swabs, mouthpieces, etc. and can order more unusual items.

Nicoletti also remains active in the community.

She was involved with Irondequoit Presbyterian Church, where her mother was music director for 40 years and was the treasurer for 13 years. She was also a member of the church choir and session (governing body).

She and her family, which also includes brother Jim Thomas, a retired Irondequoit High School French teacher, have also maintained close ties with exchange students they hosted over the years.

Nicoletti has visited Chile, where her brother and mother traveled in January, twice. She and her husband have even hosted the daughter of the family’s former exchange student, Mario Valdivias.

“We’ve had a 45-year relationship with the Valdivias,” Nicoletti said. “We are one big family, living on two continents.”

Nicoletti also has a new interest — rowing.

“After my second breast cancer, I heard about Naiades Oncology Rowing,” Nicoletti explained. “I wanted to try something outside my comfort zone … test myself; try new things.”

Naiades name was changed in 2023 to ROCCREW. It stands for Rowing Over Cancer as well as designating that the team is in Rochester.

After being invited to visit a practice, then consulting her doctors, Nicoletti joined ROCCREW and started working out with the group in January 2023.

“When you’re on the water, you can’t think of anything else; you have to pay attention — not be thinking about your next doctor’s appointment — at all times,” she said.

She had never rowed before in her life.

Last year, just her second on the team, they were invited, through a partnership with the international Survivor Rowing Network, to do an exhibition race at the prestigious Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston.

Their crew of nine, including their coxswain, who directs the team, started practicing three times a week and traveled to Boston in mid-October 2024.

“We came in last, but not by much,” she reported.

The team was just thrilled to have participated and completed the particularly challenging course.

Again, Nicoletti found herself with a “spokesperson” role as local news stations did pieces on the team and she was also asked to give a short speech in Boston.

She does not plan to go back to Boston this year, however.

“The experience there was just so phenomenal — even the weather was perfect — I knew it could never be replicated,” Nicoletti said.

She is still rowing.

“It’s really comforting, being around people who have gone through similar [medical] experiences,” Nicoletti said. “It’s a pretty special group.”

She admits she has a somewhat “love-hate” relationship with the sport, since it is hard.

“It’s much harder than it looks!” she said. “It’s both exhausting and exhilarating.”

“But rowing is like playing an instrument,” Nicoletti added. “There’s always something to learn and improve upon.”