“Ken pulled this instrument out of this blanket and I was astonished. My jaw hit the floor. I’d never seen anything like it”: Remembering Ken Parker, the genius luthier who brought us the Parker Fly

Ken Parker’s archtop quest can be traced back to a 21 year old taking guitar lessons with a jazz player named Dick Longdale in Rochester, New York.

He became fascinated by his teacher’s Gibson L-12, an early ’40s non-cutaway archtop that “sounded fantastic”, Ken remembered in a video interview last year for D’Addario’s Work/Shop feature. “I couldn’t believe how great it sounded.”

He looked but couldn’t find an archtop that sounded as good, so that’s when he concluded that he’d have to make one. He also realised that the Gibson was an outlier, an exceptional guitar that left Ken to ask the question: “Why don’t they all sound that good?”

By the mid-’70s he’d built his first archtop in a Long Island workshop he shared with a lute-maker, Robert Meadow. He showed the guitar to Matt Umanov at his store in Greenwich Village, who is reported to have told him it looked like something a hippy had made, but Jimmy D’Aquisto, who had apprenticed under John D’Angelico, told him that his archtop was the best first guitar he’d ever heard. “You’re crazy if you stop building,” he said.

But back then Ken had no clients, no market: “I couldn’t get arrested,” he told The New Yorker in 2007. Like many wannabe makers, he took a job in the repair shop of Stuyvesant Music, on West 48th St in Manhattan, from 1979.

A few years later he moved to his grandfather’s house and workshop in Seymour, Connecticut, where he continued to repair, design and study, not least old instruments such as the lute, which dramatically informed the future construction of the lightweight Parker Fly, a model that, some 30 years on, still looks radical and otherworldly.

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The concept was “an archtop guitar without a body… a top without a back or sides,” Ken told D’Addario.

This led to the “exoskeleton” design of the Fly whereby the neck was covered back and front with a composite material – “either fibreglass or carbon fibre and epoxy, or both”, he said. “Just like a cicada or a lobster, all the strength of the structure is right at the outside surface… Most of the loads are being taken by the ‘skin’ of the structure.”

The ‘Super Fly’, as it was originally called, premiered at the NAMM Show in 1992, by which time Ken had partnered with Larry Fishman. The pair had met in the early ’80s.

“Ken pulled this instrument out of this blanket and I was astonished, my jaw hit the floor,” Larry told this writer in the mid-’90s. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was a solidbody six-string bass that weighed about 4lb! It sounded like God playing the piano…”

Fishman contributed the acoustic transducer and more to the design, while financial backing from Korg paid for patents and the establishment of the factory to build the hugely complex design. “We developed all the processes and machinery at Parker to build the Fly,” Larry told D’Addario.

By 2003 and some 30,000 instruments later, Ken had left the company he’d co-founded and then returned a while later to building archtops, utilising his by-then immense knowledge of acoustics, alternative materials and sound, exemplified by his 2006 ‘Olive Branch’ modern archtop, with its light weight and uniquely adjustable neck.

Long considered an authority, his Archtoppery video series, which kicked off in 2020, is a must-watch for the modern guitar maker. It’s little surprise, then, that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has two Ken Parker guitars on permanent display: an original pre-production Fly prototype from 1987 and a later 2016 acoustic archtop.

“It’s pretty great,” he told D’Addario. “I’m in there with Stradivarius and Amati products. It’s quite an honour.”

“Ken’s probably the most accomplished guitar builder in the world today, I think,” longtime friend and co-conspirator Larry Fishman told D’Addario last year. “If you look at what he does, no-one else can do it, no-one else can conceive it.”

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.