For the last five years, John Pizzarelli has favored us with a visit just about every time he passes through Seattle. On his most recent stop he showed off his newest guitar – a Les Paul-inspired Moll 7-string goldtop – and played a lovely, all-too-appropriate version of “How High the Moon,” the Nancy Hamilton/Morgan Lewis song that topped the charts for Les Paul and Mary Ford back in 1951.
Luthier Bill Moll isn’t building guitars regularly these days (he’s now building firearms), but in 2014 he made an exception here for one of his signature artists. It sticks pretty close to the blueprint for Pizzarelli’s signature model Moll (a 16″, 7-string, laminated archtop with a floating Kent Armstrong neck pickup), except this guitar has the addition of a bridge pickup and has a slightly shallower body depth.
