After that the trombone went back to rest in that upstairs closet in Providence, where it stayed until the late 80s. When my father died, I thought I might want to use it in a new composition, and I brought it down from Overhill Road to New York. But the old thin black trombone case landed in the basement of my friend Melissa Gould’s apartment building and there, after a shake-up of the tenants’ storage spaces, it disappeared.

I was heartbroken. That horn was my one material musical link to my father and to my own early years. My ambition to search for it in all the pawn shops in the city melted in the summer heat. One old Olds was missing in action — gone, just had to live with it.

Like a religious icon, that simple instrument had been a powerful catalyst in my becoming a professional music maker. Its primitive brass tubing, curves and spit-valve and all, was itself a resonant gesture, resembling a person about to start making music. For me, it was the essence of unabashed musical Americana, its mouthpiece an amalgam of chopped liver, Mom’s tuna salad, kosher hot dogs, kasha and planetary garlic breath fused with silver and steel and a century of house mold. Gone, it left only a tarnished brass memory. For years, the pristine analog sound of Kid Ory on Dixie trombone could make me stop, listen and open a nostalgic bottle of India Pale Ale any time of day or night.

A few months ago, Melissa moved from her longtime Fifth Avenue apartment to a place in the country, and amid her things piled high, misplaced, or forgotten in the basement emerged a slim black musty instrument case. It was it, and on the inside the instrument was intact. She emailed videos immediately to me in Rome, proof it was real: trombone life after death, a brass miracle, then bubble-wrapped the case to the hilt and Fedexed it over.

I let it sit for a few days to acclimatize. Then with my wife, Susan, snapping pictures I carefully removed the layers of wrappings one at a time with a kitchen knife — and then opened the latches to reveal an unpolished silent brass corpse inside, smelling exactly the same as it did when I surreptitiously opened that case for the first time some 70 years earlier in Providence.

I took it out, assembled the beautiful, slender parts, deposited some spit on the slide, which worked smoothly, and proceeded to play the prelude to the third act of “Lohengrin,” which I had never before tried in my life. I got through three arpeggios before my lip turned blue, and I felt as if I had just had a triple bypass while standing on two feet. Soon Marty’s childhood horn will forget that it ever spoke Yiddish and start speaking proper Italian.