Jeffrey Elliott, 2006

Julian Bream owned one; Ralph Towner has played his for decades. Jeffrey Elliott builds a handful of guitars a year in Portland, Oregon, his waiting list has been closed for years, and the people who own his instruments almost never sell them. This 2006 Elliott, spruce over Indian rosewood with Rodgers tuning machines, is the rare exception, and it has been kept in essentially mint condition.

Elliott's reputation rests on a particular kind of guitar: built on the Torres and Hauser tradition, tailored to the individual player, finished in French polish, and refined over fifty years of building, teaching, and restoring the great Spanish instruments. He apprenticed with Richard Schneider in Detroit from 1966 to 1972, helped build the first of the Kasha design guitars, and then set that experiment aside to follow the traditional path. His reference points are the guitars he has had on his own bench: Segovia's 1937 Hauser, Bream's 1973 Romanillos, and Pepe Romero's 1856 Torres.

The players tell the story. Julian Bream played an Elliott in concert in 1985 and owned a 1986 Elliott, the guitar pictured on the cover of his Rodrigo and Brouwer concertos recording. Ralph Towner's main instrument for decades has been a 1995 Elliott in exactly this wood combination, spruce and Indian rosewood, which he has called the most perfectly balanced guitar he has ever played. Earl Klugh owned a 1994 Elliott in spruce and Indian rosewood, and Leo Kottke has played several of his guitars.

What makes an Elliott on the secondary market so unusual is simple arithmetic. He has never been a prolific builder, a guitar takes him about three months, and the waiting list ran to fifteen years before he closed it. Owners who waited that long tend to keep what they waited for, and Elliott himself often brokers the few that come back to people still on his list. They very rarely reach an open market. We had the honor of representing a 2020 Elliott a few years ago, a guitar that still comes up in conversation in the shop, and this 2006 is only the second to pass through our hands.

The 2020 Elliott left a clear picture of what these guitars do, and this 2006, allowing for the shift from cedar to spruce, speaks the same language. The first thing anyone notices is the immediacy. Notes leap off the string with almost no effort and then keep going, and that rare pairing of quick attack with long, even resonance gives the sensation of a sustain pedal under the fingers. It is the quality that makes an Elliott feel so alive under the right hand, and it is here.

The balance is the other hallmark. Powerful, foundational basses meet singing trebles that stay pure and clear across the entire fingerboard, and the middle strings hold their own instead of disappearing. Elliott has said that loudness is one criterion but not the most important one, and that volume without clarity only produces a distorted sound in the hall; his guitars are built to that philosophy, and nothing dominates. Spruce over Indian rosewood is the combination Ralph Towner chose for the instrument he has played for decades, and here it gives the trebles a little more sparkle and the fundamental a little more definition than the cedar guitar had, while twenty years of settling have opened the sound and made the response immediate.

The character is refined rather than brash. Notes have a quick, clean onset and then bloom, with enough overtone to give warmth without clouding the line. Chords stay transparent, so inner voices in Bach or Sor remain audible, and single note lines have the singing, cello like quality that players associate with the best Hauser style guitars. It is a guitar that rewards expressive nuance and still offers real headroom when a piece asks for power: play it gently and it answers with intimacy, lean into it and it gives more without hardening.

The playability is cut from the same cloth as the 2020 guitar. The setup is clean, the fretwork precise, and the ergonomics are the kind that let the instrument disappear in the hands within a few minutes, so that the player thinks about the music rather than the guitar. The 650 mm scale is standard, the French polish is thin enough to feel the wood through it, and the Rodgers machines make tuning precise and smooth.

The signed label reads Jeffrey R. Elliott, Luthier, in Portland, Oregon, 2006. The headstock is Elliott's own silhouette, a maple leaf outline that is his nod to the Pacific Northwest, with a rosewood headplate split by a single light center stripe. The Rodgers machines are fitted with engraved plates and mother of pearl buttons.

The rosette is one of Elliott's natural state wood rosettes, a ring of spalted, figured wood with its dark mineral lines left to make their own pattern, bordered by fine green, black, and white purfling. It is the opposite of a mosaic: no two are alike, and this one is especially lively. The top is a tight, straight grained two piece set of spruce, and the back and sides are a quartersawn set of Indian rosewood with a light center strip.

Elliott builds on the Spanish heel, with an ebony fingerboard, a rosewood bridge with a traditional tie block, and a 650 mm scale. Every Elliott guitar is finished in French polish applied by his partner, the luthier Cyndy Burton, whose work in shellac is as well known among builders as Elliott's own.

Specifications

Finish: French polish (Cyndy Burton)
Fingerboard: Ebony
Bridge: Rosewood, traditional tie block
Rosette: Natural state spalted wood
Condition: Excellent; one two inch fingernail mark on the upper top, no cracks or repairs

Jeffrey R. Elliott was born in Chicago and raised in Detroit, took up the guitar at sixteen, and performed folk music professionally while studying fine arts at Michigan State. A visit to Richard Schneider's Detroit workshop in 1964 changed the course of his life; in 1966 he became Schneider's first apprentice, and over the next six years he worked beside him on the early Kasha design instruments as well as traditional guitars. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 1973 and has built there ever since.

Elliott has taught guitar making privately since 1972 and at the American School of Lutherie in Healdsburg, one of his guitars was shown at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery in 1978, and he has been a member of the Guild of American Luthiers since 1975, contributing more than fifty articles and a series of measured plans, including a 1943 Hauser, Tárrega's 1888 Torres, a 1930 Santos Hernández, and his own open harmonic bar classical guitar. He has restored both the 1888 Torres and an 1869 Francisco González, and his long study of the Hauser guitars informs everything he builds.

Since 1990 most of his guitars have been built on his open harmonic bar bracing, a design inspired by Torres's La Leona and Bream's 1973 Romanillos, in which the transverse bars above and below the soundhole are opened to let the top move more freely, for a more immediate response and a broader tonal and dynamic range. He still builds for the clients on his waiting list and is not accepting new commissions. His partner, Cyndy Burton, is a luthier in her own right and French polishes every instrument that leaves the shop.

Excellent, and essentially mint apart from one fingernail mark of roughly two inches on the upper bout of the spruce top. There are no cracks and no repairs, and the back, sides, and neck are clean.