Finger Pickin’ Good

Lawyer and guitar fanatic Henry Lowenstein brings the Newport Guitar Festival to the Miami Beach Convention Center

By Ben Torter

The Spider Web guitar, by master inlay artist Larry Robinson, is priced at a cool $350,000. Photo courtesy of Newport Guitar Festival Miami Beach

Music aficionado Henry Lowenstein has traveled to guitar shows all across the country amassing quite an impressive collection of hand-built guitars in his mid-Beach home. Last year he bought an entire guitar festival and brought it home too.

The Newport Guitar Festival Miami Beach debuts this weekend at the Miami Beach Convention Center.  A gathering of more than 70 of the world’s top hand-built guitar makers, vintage guitar vendors and guitar strummers, it is the first festival of its kind to come to South Florida.

“I brought it here because I felt South Florida had the demographics to really lift it to a different level,” Lowenstein said. “That’s turning out to be true. People are coming from all over the world. It is turning out to be the premier guitar event in the country.”

The show will feature 240 mini-concerts from musicians such as The John Jorgenson Quintet, Steve Wildey, Larry Pattis, Danny Combs and national finger-style champion Michael Chapdelaine. There will be wood dealers and an array of accessory makers.

Master classes exploring topics ranging from “alternative tunings” to “how to choose the right guitar” and “innovations in guitar construction” will begin Friday morning and continue through the weekend. Renowned luthiers including Michael Keller, Manteleone Guitars, as well as the local legend Paris Banchetti, will have booths showing off their creations, valued between $500 and $300,000.

The Italian-born Banchetti has been making instruments for 53 years, and it was his talent that earned him papers to live in the United States in 1975. He works out of a studio in South Miami.

“Mr. Claude Pepper, the [former] senator from Florida, picked up the telephone and called the employment office and said, ‘approve the application, we need this man in this country,” said Banchetti, who has rehabbed guitars for Lowenstein. “For us who make instruments, [the festival] will make good publicity.”

Music is in Lowenstein’s blood, and he figures it came from his grandmother, who owned a music store in Virginia in the 1930s. An attorney and renaissance man, Lowenstein once owned his own music stores, South Beach Music on Eighth Street in Miami Beach, and another in the old Charles Hotel at Collins and 15th Street. He’s been strumming guitars since he was 11 years old, and played in the University of Missouri orchestra band in high school, and the Columbia University jazz band, as well as others.

Playing music has been a constant in Lowenstein’s life no matter what else was going on, and not even a health crisis could end the love affair.

“I developed a really nasty form of reactive arthritis some years ago, and I had to get rid of the guitars I couldn’t play because of my hands,” Lowenstein said. “I started looking for guitars that I could play, and that is what introduced me to this whole world of hand-built guitars where you can get things custom-built to just exactly your specifications. I told the luthiers that if I got to the point where I couldn’t play at all, I wanted something so beautiful that I wouldn’t mind not playing, but could just look at it as a piece of art.”

It was on one of those trips that he met Keller.

“Henry [Lowenstein] walked up to my table at the 2003 Healdsburg [guitar] show [in California], looking for a totally, tastefully over-the-top guitar,” Keller said. The guitar is featured in the posters for the shows.

The Newport Festival was started in Rhode Island by luthier Julius Borges (who will be displaying his craft this year) because he hurt his wrist and couldn’t make guitars anymore. He ran it for three years before his injuries healed and he decided to go back to guitar making. To ensure the festival wouldn’t fade away, Lowenstein bought it with his two nonguitar-laying business partners, Ron Hill and Eric Garcia.

The trio has spent about $1 million on the show and $500,000 on advertising nationally and internationally.

“This really has turned into much more of a big deal than I thought it would,” Garcia said. “I just Googled our show today and I couldn’t believe how many people are coming from all over the world.”

Even those who have no artistic or aesthetic interest in collecting guitars might want to think of them as an alternative to the housing or stock markets.

“Guitars have outstripped the S&P 500,” Lowenstein said. “And in fact there is a guitar hedge fund that was formed just last month in London by the Anchorage Capital Group. It’s amazing how much these guitars go up in value. If you’d bought a John Monteleone guitar 15 years ago you might have paid $5,000 for it, and you can’t touch it for less than $35,000 today.”

For the most part, though, the festival is for those who love fine handmade instruments and the music made with them.

“What Henry is staging is one of the top three shows in the world,” Keller said, and for collectors it will offer a rare chance to pick up guitars by builders who are normally backlogged for years. “This is not just an exhibition, it’s a sales event. You can come into this show and approach someone who’s backlogged three or four years and actually buy a guitar from them without waiting.”

The Newport Guitar Festival in Miami Beach is at the Miami Beach Convention Center April 11-13. Tickets are $20 for a one-day pass, $36 for two days and $48 for all three days. For more information visit: www.newportguitarfestivalmiamibeach.com.

Comments? E-mail ben@miamisunpost.com