Michael Dunn - BC Industry Builder Award 2018

[Meredith Coloma]

Vancouver International Guitar Festival is proud to announce B.C. master luthier Michael Dunn will receive the 2018 Luthier Industry Builder Award.

VIGF presents the award annually to an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the evolution of the guitar building industry. This year’s presentation will take place at the festival on Aug 11, 2018 with Michael Dunn in attendance.

A career retrospective of Michael Dunn guitars will be displayed during the festival, which runs August 11-12 at Vancouver’s Creekside Community Recreation Centre in the former Olympic Village.

Over a half century Dunn has built more than 600 guitars for some of the world’s foremost players and collectors, and has mentored more than 100 luthiers in his East Vancouver workshop. He is renowned as an artist and innovator who continually breaks the mold to create instruments that are works of sculptural art with extraordinary qualities of sound and playability.

Among prominent players of Dunn guitars are Chet Atkins, Bob Brozman, and Debashish Bhattacharya.

“To call him a master doesn’t even begin to describe the genius of Michael Dunn,” says VIGF co-producer and luthier Meredith Coloma, who apprenticed with Dunn when she was starting out. “I basically stalked him until he agreed to take me on. I could not have had a finer teacher and role model. No one matches his creative output, in terms of style and sound.”

Dunn is best known for his Selmer-style guitars built in the Gypsy Jazz tradition made famous by Django Reinhardt in the 1930s. Having played and studied guitar since he was a child, Dunn is also acclaimed for his Gypsy-style performances in Vancouver jazz clubs.

His output covers a wide range of styles, including Weissenborn-inspired lap slide guitars, Hawaiian guitars, OM acoustics, harp guitars and ukuleles, lutes, even a 21-string African kora. But his first love is the Selmer with its characteristic D-hole construction, mandolin-style bent top behind a floating bridge, and interior resonator box that redirects sonic waves into a parabolic reflector that projects sound at higher frequencies.

Dunn has been experimenting with resonator technology since the 1960s when he spent three years in Spain apprenticing with two classical flamenco guitar makers. He recounts coming across a steel-string variant of the flamenco, with a D-shaped sound hole and a built-in resonator. That guitar changed his world. It was an old Maccaferri model, built by the French manufacturer Selmer in the ’30s. Dunn has been experimenting with interior resonators ever since. “I’ve taken that technology and modified it, reshaped it, and rejigged it in every imaginable way.”



Michael Dunn’s “Mystery Pacific,” a Maccaferri-style Gypsy guitar.

Dunn has bravely followed his muse into the world of fine art and design. His “Cubist” guitar is Inspired by the work of Juan Gris, with an off-centered body that seems constructed from parts of other guitars, fanned frets, and an eye-popping back comprising panels of rosewood, ironwood, ebony, bloodwood, blackwood, satinwood, purpleheart and sumac; the traditional sound hole is replaced by a “sound slot” on the back.



Cubist Guitar

His Bugatti Guitar is inspired by the hand-built French touring cars of the early 1900s, its yellow cedar and ebony detailing echoing the car’s vintage colors and a horseshoe sound hole modeled after the Bugatti grill.




The Bugatti

Dunn has said luthiers must build 100 guitars to really understand what they’re doing. “There’s a romanticized view of guitar making,” says the 75-year-old master. “It’s a lot of bloody hard work.”

For more information on Michael Dunn, the Luthier Industry Builder Award and the 2018 Vancouver International Guitar Festival, please visit....

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[iim7V7IM7]

Long overdue...

[jmat]

I like that his guitars contain a joyous humor.