Like many youngsters, my first encounters with archtop guitars took place while trudging my way through the Mel Bay Method for a succession of teachers with bad complexions and big Italian cheesecake guitars, generally the Excel or New Yorker models crafted by the Lower East Side luthier John D’Angelico—D’Aquisto’s mentor. Plucking away on my $35 Danelectro hollow-body electric (a harmonious marriage of prime Formica and Masonite), I was in awe of these larger-than-life instruments, with their warm, penetrating sound—bejeweled as they were with ornate abalone and mother-of-pearl inlays, gold-plated fittings and elegant cream bindings. Following the elder D’Angelico’s death, Jimmy D’Aquisto was defined by that tradition and extended it—a source of both great pride and frustration for this bold, gifted artisan.
“He was torn between that world, and what he thought was right,” according to friend John Monteleone, a master archtop luthier from Long Island with a formidable reputation among players and collectors. “It must have consumed him, because he was a passionate, imaginative fellow, who really had the creative juices flowing. You see, when you begin to wrestle with these materials, you get used to dealing with it according to your experience. So people like Jimmy and I used to think about things a lot from a player’s point of view, and that gives you ideas, and when you have ideas, you tend to want to try them out. Some things may not turn out to be all that good; it’s just as valuable to learn what is wrong as what is right.”
To this end, D’Aquisto was always pushing the envelope. In the mid-’60s he began routing out acoustic tone chambers from solid pieces of maple, then sealed them with a carved spruce top for an instrument that looked and felt like a solid body, but sounded like an amplified acoustic archtop. And by the end of his life, with the Solo, Avant Garde and Centura models, D’Aquisto zeroed in on a more personal sound, feel and aesthetic, replacing those obtrusive plastic pickguards with a sleek ebony finger-rest, experimenting with height-adjustable ebony tailpieces and larger bridges in an attempt to fine-tune the down tension of the instrument’s top and voice through external adjustments. “Instruments back then were not designed to be played the way that you’re playing today,” said D’Aquisto. “They were designed for a specific style of playing. I know. I was there making ’em. An archtop guitar was made to have a penetration and a cutting power that would project. It’s the king of guitars, and there’s no limit to the number of ways you can voice a custom archtop guitar. But while the music’s changed, we’re still employing technologies of the ’30s.”
Veteran luthier Robert Benedetto, whose custom archtop guitars are employed by virtuosos like Jimmy Bruno and Jack Wilkins, the tried and true remains relevant. “The so-called ’30s technology really hasn’t changed,” he asserts. “Those fundamentals still work, and I have yet to see anything, from any makers, myself included, that constitutes a meaningful improvement. I guess that makes me the doubting Thomas of luthiers, and sure, there have been a lot of refinements: the tops and backs are being graduated and more finely tuned now than they were in the past, resulting in a guitar that should mature to have a better voice as it is aged. But I don’t see any radical changes in jazz or playing styles or the instruments themselves.”
Clearly, archtop luthiers differ as to whether the archtop guitar is best regarded as a finished painting or a blank canvas upon which to depict fresh tonal colors. “If you give everyone the same ingredients and recipe to make this guitar, they’re all going to come out different,” concludes Monteleone, bespeaking the enduring originality of this instrument, which like the country that bred it, is equal parts Yankee ingenuity and old-world artistry, dating back to the post-Civil War vision of Orville Gibson.
To get in touch with archtop guitar luthier, visit Fine Archtops at www.FineArchtops.com.
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