The story goes that Linda Manzer got hooked on instrument building after making a dulcimer for herself in high school, or shortly after, in art college maybe, and never gave it up. Manzer has built several guitars for Bruce Cockburn, and he has purchased others second hand. Currently, Bruce plays two Manzer six strings and a twelve string, as well as the charango, which was the first instrument she built for him. But Cockburn is just one of Manzer’s high-profile clients. Pat Metheny, Stephen Fearing, Mary Lynn Hammond are just some of the remarkable musicians to play her instruments. She has built close to thirty instruments for Pat Metheny alone, including a sitar-style guitar, baritones, and “The Pikasso,” with four necks, two sound holes, and forty-two strings.
In the early and mid-70s, players like Michael Hedges, Richard Thompson, John Renbourn, and Bruce Cockburn were pushing the limitations of the instrument. Jean Larrivée responded by building an acoustic guitar with a cutaway design to give the player access to the upper frets. His first models to incorporate the design were called the Larrivée C-series. Bruce Cockburn received one of two of these early cutaways, which perpetuated the idea that the C-series had been made specifically for Bruce, a story he denied in an interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine.[1]
But David Wren, a luthier apprenticing at the same time as Linda Manzer, remembers it differently. Cockburn had been visiting Larrivée’s shop in Toronto quite regularly in the early 1970s. In an interview with Jon Carroll from December 17, 2000, posted on The Cockburn Project, David Wren remembers that Bruce “requested a cutaway, which at that time was a completely outrageous idea. I had never seen that on a flat-top steel string.”[2] So, either the first steel-string acoustic guitar was made for Bruce Cockburn, or he was given one of the first made.
She needn’t have
worried. Players who tried the wedge design were immediately taken with the
comfort it offered. Cockburn found that the modification helped relieve a
pinched nerve in his elbow. And soon, other luthiers were adopting the design
into their builds.
“I was very discreet
about it for the first few years, but once people started copying the design I
realized I had to attach my name to it so people would know it was my idea, and
that I wasn’t copying someone else,” says Linda.
Rather than trying
to prevent other luthiers from using the modification, Linda made it open
source, for a price. “At the beginning, I gladly excepted a bottle of wine each
time somebody used it. If I had kept that up I would have quite a wine
collection,” she says.
The wedge is now
open for anyone to use if due credit is given to its inventor.
Guitar-making is
akin to a spiritual practice for Linda Manzer, and players speak of her
instruments as living beings. There is a bit of animism at play with
instruments and musicians. An instrument needs to be played, otherwise they
quite literally go to sleep. The wood becomes rigid. After a prolonged time
without use, the instrument will sound thin and become less playable. The more
regularly an instrument is played, the more it opens up. A good guitar gets
better with age, if consistently played. And the guitar will change in response
to the specific player. Wear on the fret wires and fretboard under the strings
and the back of the neck reveals the favorite positions of the guitarist.
Slowly, a guitar will mirror the player’s habits. Many guitar players claim an
instrument takes on the spirit of the player.
“I actually do
believe objects can hold a little essence of the person they spend a lot of
time with,” says Linda Manzer. “I have personally experienced getting a
guitar back from somebody for repair and feeling as if they are in the room
with me. After a few days that leaves, and I infuse the guitar back with a
little bit of me. It sounds a little hokey, but I bet someday in the future
what I feel intuitively will be scientifically proven.”
She does not produce a great many guitars, and
her instruments, new and used, are prized among players. These are not entry
level instruments. A used instrument, like the 1979 model formerly owned by
Stephen Fearing, has been listed for $14,000 US. A new Manzer guitar can go for
$25,000 and more. The building process can take eighteen months. It is slow,
meticulous work.
In 1989, Stephen
Fearing was looking for a new guitar. His Guild D-35 was falling apart. He’d
heard of Linda Manzer through his friend the late Willie P. Bennet, for whom
Fearing’s current band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings began as a tribute. As luck
would have it, Linda had a guitar for sale.
“I like the idea of
hand-built guitars,” says Fearing. “And I was definitely aware of Larrivée.
Somehow, I knew that Linda had studied with Larrivée, which made me curious.”
Fearing paid $2,900
for his first Manzer guitar, which, he says, “was a king’s ransom at the time.”
He played that guitar for thirty years until, on the anniversary of that purchase, Linda Manzer presented Fearing with a new guitar. “I’d been trying to figure out how I could afford a new one,” he says. Astonishingly, a fan willed Fearing a Linda Manzer guitar that had not been played. It had sat on a stand in the corner of a room for years. When Stephen Fearing received it, the guitar needed some work. He brought it to Tony Duggan-Smith, who performed a neck reset, which involves removing the neck from the body, adjusting the joint, reattaching, then refinishing the sound board. The guitar also had a mother-of-pearl unicorn on the headstock, which Stephen had removed.
Linda took it back in trade for the new guitar.
“It’s an astounding
guitar,” says Fearing of the new instrument. “It has the wedge, and it has my
signature beautifully inlaid on the twelfth fret. She cut it out of mother of
pearl. Linda said she didn’t breathe for an hour. Mother of pearl is super thin
and very brittle. She glued a piece to thin plywood then used a Dremel tool to
cut around my signature. Astounding.”
In recent years,
Linda Manzer has been building guitars for exhibitions in art galleries. It is
kind of full circle. Before she joined Jean Larriveé’s team at the age of
twenty-two, Linda studied painting in college.
One recent project included six fellow Larrivée protégés, whom Manzer calls her “tribe of littermates,” each building a guitar in honour of a member of The Group of Seven. Linda’s guitar is a tribute to Lawren Harris and his painting Mt Lefroy (1930). The main part of the guitar is a traditional six string, but a shorter, eight-stringed harp neck juts up toward the player like the mountain peak for which it’s named. The guitar body is painted white like winter on Abbot Pass and gradually becomes icy blue toward the harp neck, which is shaped to resemble Mt. Lefroy itself. The guitar is now part of the Group of Seven permanent holdings at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Bruce Cockburn surprised Manzer by composing a piece for the instrument called “The Mt. Lefroy Waltz," which was later released on his Crowing Ignites album with a band arrangement of bass, drums, cornet, and electric guitar, but no little harp.
“I tried to come up with something icy
sounding,” Cockburn told The Globe and
Mail’s Brad Wheeler. “The guitar favours the higher frequencies, and I
tried to write that into the piece. It played
very well. I was even able to use the ‘harp’ strings that are part
of its architecture.”[4]
Manzer continues to
build for players as well and is excited about the quality of luthier-built
guitars in Canada at present.
“I notice other
builder’s designs,” she says. “But I don’t particularly study them. I am more
interested in building techniques and how other builders technically assemble
their guitars, the tonal choices they make. There are so many great and
innovative builders out there right now. It’s nice to see everyone sharing
ideas and technique.”
[1] Acoustic Guitar Magazine. (January 28,
2015) [Video] https://youtu.be/W8sYV_eo7_Y?t=1420
[2] Carroll,
J. (December 17, 2000). Interview with David Wren. http://cockburnproject.net/news/001217davidwren.html
[3] Pikasso.
(n.d.) https://manzer.com/guitars/custom-models/pikasso/
[4] Wheeler, B. (December 31, 2016). Masterwork
guitar exhibit honours Group of Seven. The
Globe and Mail.
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