GUITAR HEROES

The duo that collected a secret trove of instruments heading to the Met.

- BY NICK PAUMGARTEN

In 2007, Jayson Dobney, an Iowan with a master’s degree in the history of musical instruments, from the University of South Dakota, moved to New York to be a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For decades, there had been whispers in guitar circles of a vast trove of twentieth-century guitars, in private hands, somewhere in the tri-state area—an El Dorado of coveted Strats and Les Pauls and Martins of impeccable provenance. Even in Vermillion, South Dakota, Dobney had heard the rumors. Coming east, he wanted to learn more, especially because the Met's instruments department, for all its heirlooms (the world’s oldest piano, three Stradivarius violins, a Mayan double whistle), possessed almost nothing from the twentieth century.

In 2011, Dobney put together an exhibition celebrating the work of the Italian American luthiers who had designed and built the archtop guitars beloved by jazz musicians. Seeking objects for the show, he met a record producer and guitar maven named Perry Margouleff, who said that he might have a few instruments to share, as an anonymous lender. Dobney visited a warehouse outside the city where, in a reception area, Margouleff showed him eight guitars. “It was so secretive that when I, as a curator of the Met, came to visit, I had no idea what was actually there. I just saw those eight guitars,” Dobney told me recently.

Unseen that day was the rest of the collection, the one that so many people had wondered about. Also unseen: the man who owns it, Dirk Ziff, a wealthy publishing heir and financier with a reputation, too, as a connoisseur and a guitarist who had recorded and toured with Carly Simon. Few people were aware that the two men had spent decades working together to assemble what is now recognized as the world’s finest collection of vintage guitars.