Jacques Favino Oval Hole First Year?

denk8 · October 2018

Anyone know or have seen the earliest year Jacques Favino oval hole gypsy guitar?

spatzo · October 2018

Favino started his own atelier in 1946. When Selmer ended his activity in guitars, favino bought some necks, and guitar parts (bodies, etc) from Selmer and by the way his first guitars were true Selmers. The year? It could be something such as 1953/1954.

MichaelHorowitz · October 2018

The model 10 “Gitan” doesn’t seem to go back further than the early 60s. Before that you just find f hole Chauvet-Favinos and the Selmer parts guitars that @spatzo mentioned.

ChrisMartin · October 2018

After working for Busato and then in partnership with Jean Chauvet, the first F-hole Chauvet-Favino guitars were made in 1949. These two later separated and Favino set up shop at 9 rue de Clignancourt in Paris. He would make guitars of all types; classical, folk or jazz but, in agreement with Chauvet he would not make violins and Chauvet would not make guitars! At this point interestingly Favino was supposedly the first to make 12 string guitars in France.

Favino was selling all he could make to the Paris music stores including Major Conn, Lutherie Centrale, Masspacher and the Pierre Beuscher shop at 66 l’Avenue de La Motte-Picquet.
This latter should not be confused with the better known Paul Beuscher as they were unrelated. It was even suggested that this business was started by Pierre’s father Jean Beuscher but he chose to use his son’s name so as to profit from the confusion caused by the similarity to the bigger P. Beuscher already established near La Bastille.

Whatever, it was Pierre Beuscher who had bought the remaining parts, moulds and tools when Selmer stopped making guitars in 1952.

In an interview in 1991 Jacques Favino explained the following :
The Selmer stock consisted of mainly necks, tuners and tailpieces and Pierre Beuscher asked Jacques Favino to use these to make guitars for his shop. There were no bodies and the initial order was for about 20 guitars. Favino made bodies for them which although similar to the Selmer design he fitted bracing of his own design. He also made them slightly larger than the originals, but having inherited the Selmer moulds it is not known if he altered these or decided to make his own.

So, Beuscher had bought these parts sometime after 1952 and it would seem the first Selmer/Favinos would have been made soon after that.

Favino had already worked on some Selmer and other guitars brought to him for repair by some of the local players and he had started to experiment with alternate bracing when the Corsican Antoine Bonelli asked him to replace the damaged top on his Selmer (at that time the guitarist was accompanying Tino Rossi, a popular singing star). Favino obliged but with his own bracing which was said to have “sounded like a cannon” and he was asked to make two more. Word soon spread among the Corsican guitarists and it was they, led by Paolo Quilicci who were the first customers for Favino’s oval hole guitars.

The first Favino oval hole guitars were made entirely by Jacques on his own but by 1954 business must have been growing as by 1954 he also employed Gino Papiri (his brother-in-law who had originally got him a job with Busato years earlier) and Ugo Terraneo although Favino himself continued making the tops and overseeing the rest. He, (coincidentally at the same time as Antoine Di Mauro) changed from French polishing by hand to spray finishing in 1956, presumably to speed up production.

Enrico Macias ordered his first Favino guitar in about 1957 or ’58 and it was only at this time that his fame brought the Gypsy customers to his workshop. Although it is reported that he made about 500 guitars by hand with his own signed and numbered label he obviously made a lot more that were sold with other retailer’s labels, confusingly by now also including Paul Beuscher.

By the 1960s though the retailers were demanding ever lower prices (to increase their margins) and this, along with the new cheaper imports coming from Japan, meant that Favino, along with Fontaine and Jacobacci saw orders decline and he went back to only making guitars individually to order. In fact it was said it was this decline in business that also affected the violin market and subsequently drove his former partner Chauvet to suicide in 1981.

Favino had first met Matelo Ferret as far back as 1949 and he became a good friend and customer in the 1960s as did many other well known players. Favino had worked on guitars made for Georges Brassens during his early years at Busato and he too became a regular customer.

So, it would seem that the first batch of Selmer/Favino oval hole guitars would date from between 1952 and 1954 followed by an increasing number of guitars both made to order and mass produced for retail stores through the late ‘50s. The Model 10 that Michael refers to above may have been created later to possibly rationalise production in the same way that my classical Model 5 was through the 1960s but he was certainly already quite busy through the second half of the 1950s.

Sorry to ramble on there, the above is from what is known from various sources but the most reliable would be Jacques himself and much of the above is quoted from an interview that was published in 1991. If there are some grey areas in the timeline we can only draw our own conclusions as to who did what and when.

denk8 · October 2018

During the mid fifties he was making mostly the round hole junior version of his trademark model 10. I don't think one of these has ever crossed the ocean. Probably few made and kept in some European collections.
According to this registry a Selmer oval hole was built by Jacques pre 1960.
It make sense, as he had access to Selmer parts.
The rumor is he had more than one made.
http://www.djangobooks.com/favinoarchive/1950s/1950sFavino.htm

ChrisMartin · October 2018

Not rumour.

Sorry, was my account above too long to be read?

Most of the information in it came from an interview Jacques Favino gave to Rosyne Charle Tejedor in 1991. Rosyne was a founder member and Vice-President of the APLG (Association Professionnelle des Luthiers artisans en Guitare).

He had more than 'access' to Selmer parts, Beuscher gave him the leftover stock specifically to make finished guitars and Favino himself remembered there being about twenty made. These were followed by orders from others as listed above.

Yes, he was making other models too, but there were certainly oval-hole guitars both with Selmer parts and made from scratch by Jacques in the 1950s.

spatzo · October 2018

I met Pierre Beuscher several times in 1977 and spoke with him when I was buying Argentine strings in his shop. He was a kind man and a true Django fan. He showed me the famous nylon D-hole Selmer Django played once and was photographed with. He was proud to be the owner of that guitar

spatzo · October 2018

This one

scot · October 2018

Received wisdom says that all the Selmers built by Favino had rosewood necks. But some rosewood neck Selmers were built in the factory, too. The rosewood blanks were supposedly too dense to shape on Selmer's machinery and Jacques Favino carved them by hand. I played the Selmer/Favino guitar in the link above 25 years ago. It was an amazing guitar, though the neck was so heavy that it did not rest easily on the thigh - the headstock wanted to droop.

ChrisMartin · October 2018

scot wrote: »

Received wisdom says that all the Selmers built by Favino had rosewood necks. But some rosewood neck Selmers were built in the factory, too. The rosewood blanks were supposedly too dense to shape on Selmer's machinery and Jacques Favino carved them by hand. I played the Selmer/Favino guitar in the link above 25 years ago. It was an amazing guitar, though the neck was so heavy that it did not rest easily on the thigh - the headstock wanted to droop.

Yes, Jacques also said in that interview that the Selmer necks were all rosewood.