Surfing around today I found this article on a 1938 Levin de Luxe archtop owned by Fred Guy. What'a ya think fellas--is this the one Django's playing in the famous WIlliam Gottlieb photo? Article posted Aug 8, 2011. AE
http://www.guitaraficionado.com/the-find-1938-levin-de-luxe.html
Comments
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Levin-G ... 0618990772
Nobody won the auction.
$125.000.00 and it's yours.
It's a really beautiful and colourful guitar, something you wouldn't have guessed by seeing the B&W photos.
Love the pic there of Fred Guy playing the guitar ala Freddie Green style with it angled on his lap. People -- check out the listing and see the pics of this guitar while they can. AE
Go here to browse photos:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/gott ... ndex1.html
Or here for all Fred Guy photos:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?a ... ,+Fred+?++))
Don't forget to click "Retrieve higher resolution JPEG version".
All the Gottlieb Jpegs are badly compressed. You will achieve a much greater result by downloading the TIFFs and coverting them to Jpegs yourself, making sure to convert them in HQ.
Just goes to show you, what's a guitar worth? What someone's willing to pay for it.
12 years later, it’s up for auction again.
And it now has a list price of £70k-140k.
I think that’s very ambitious. The association with Django is very weak, there’s no evidence he ever played the guitar, he just posed with it for one set of photos. No doubt he had a strum or two but ultimately that’s conjecture.
The guitar itself is not particularly collectible and Fred Guy is a minor figure in jazz history, so I can’t see where the value is in this lot.
I've had so many vintage Selmers, Bustaos, etc come through the shop over the years. I'm certain Django probably strummed a chord on at least one of them at some point. I just wish I knew which one and had a photo of it!
Apparently this one does have a photo. Second photo of Fred Guy of Duke Ellington's band from the same club. But I don't think that gets one any closer to playing like Django!
This guitar was on display when I went to the 2013 Django exhibition at the Cite de la Musique in Paris.
According to the display case information, the famous photo of it was taken when Django was in New York City playing with the Ellington band.
Djnago was scheduled one afternoon for an important newspaper or magazine interview.
The photographer wanted photos of Django playing his guitar, and of course Django, being Django, showed up without any guitar.
So thinking quickly, somebody realized that Freddy Guy of the Ellington orchestra was nearby didn’t mind lending Django his Zephyr for the shoot.
Wouldn’t you let Django borrow your guitar? I would!
Freddy Guy was one of those 1920’s banjo players who switched to guitar in the early thirties. He was a fine rhythm player, but I never heard him play any solos.
His real greatness was as a tenor banjo player, and if you, like me, dig all the great early “jungle music” Ellington played in the Cotton Club era, then you will certainly dig Freddy’s innovative banjo work from that period.
Funny how Freddy’s guitar achieved an immortality that Freddy never did.
Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."
Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."