EL ARGENTINO
Louis Scafa • Instrument Maker
464 Second Avenue, New York City
A guitar built by hand in 1956,
in the tradition of Manuel Ramírez of Madrid
The Man Behind the Label
Louis Scafa came from Argentina. He trained in Madrid under Manuel Ramírez — one of the most influential guitar makers in history, whose workshop shaped nearly every great luthier of the twentieth century. Scafa eventually made his way to New York, where he set up his workshop on Second Avenue in a neighborhood known as Little Spain.
He advertised himself simply: El Argentino. Forty-five years of experience. Pupil of Manuel Ramírez. He built guitars, mandolins, banjos, and violins. He repaired and refinished. He worked quietly, in a small room fragrant with hide glue and fresh-cut spruce, year after year, in a city that was always moving faster than he was.
The label inside each guitar he completed recorded one thing in his own handwriting: the year.
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A Lineage in Wood
Manuel Ramírez died in 1916, but the tradition he carried did not. His students — Santos Hernández, Domingo Esteso, Modesto Borreguero — became masters in their own right, spreading the Madrid school of guitar making across Europe and the Americas.
In 1912, Ramírez had heard a young Andrés Segovia play and given him the finest guitar in his workshop, free of charge. That instrument launched Segovia’s international career and now lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is the guitar that made the classical guitar a concert instrument.
Scafa was a branch of that same tree.
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The Rosette
Most guitar rosettes are made of thin strips of colored veneer — precise, geometric, systematic. This one is different. Each piece of abalone was cut by hand, shaped to fit its neighbors, and set individually into a channel routed around the soundhole. The result shifts from blue-green to gold to silver-white depending on the light.
It is, in the most exact sense, marquetry — the craft of composing a surface from cut pieces of natural material, fitted so precisely that the joints disappear.
It is not merely decorative. It is a signature.
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The Headstock
Running the full length of the headstock’s center rib is a strip of marquetry inlay: alternating diamond-shaped lozenges of light and dark wood, set with a precision that has not loosened in nearly seventy years. The pattern creates an optical illusion of depth — a chain of interlocking cubes that appear to recede into the wood.
This detail is not visible when the guitar is being played. It faces away from the audience. It exists solely because the maker felt it should be there.
Original brass tuning machines with amber celluloid buttons — unchanged since 1956.
The Wood
The soundboard is spruce — old-growth, with grain lines so tight they are almost impossible to count. Aged nearly seventy years, it has deepened to a warm amber.
The back and sides are figured rosewood, bookmatched so that the grain mirrors symmetrically on either side of the center seam. These are the materials of a serious instrument, chosen by someone who understood what each one would contribute to the finished voice.
The wood does not lie. It is exactly what it is.
Figured rosewood sides with multi-layer rope binding.
New York City, 1956
The year this guitar was built, Miles Davis recorded ’Round About Midnight. Elvis Presley signed with RCA. The Palladium Ballroom on Broadway was at its peak — Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez filling its floors with mambo and cha-cha, the sound of a Latin New York finding its voice.
On Second Avenue, in a workshop that smelled of varnish and wood shavings, an Argentine luthier bent over a spruce soundboard and placed abalone shell, piece by piece, around a soundhole.
He wrote the year in his own hand on the label: 1956.
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A Note for the Reader
The story told in these pages — of a craftsman who left his homeland, crossed an ocean, and built a life in a new country through the work of his hands — is not only Scafa’s story.
It belongs, in its essential shape, to another man as well.
Jan came to America from Poland in the mid-1980s. He brought what Scafa had brought before him: the knowledge in his hands, an immigrant’s determination, and a love for the guitar that no distance could diminish.
He is an exceptional guitarist. And he is a craftsman — a woodworker whose specialty is hand-cut marquetry. Which means that when he looks at the rosette of this guitar, he sees the hours. When he looks at the headstock inlay, he recognizes a fellow craftsman’s signature. Not a name. A quality of attention.
This guitar was built in 1956 — the year Jan was born — by a man who crossed an ocean to practice his craft in a new world.
It seems right that it should end up in his hands.
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