[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PERFORMING]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: My name is Toby Summerfield. I'm a guitar player and bass player in Chicago.

Specific to experimental or avant-garde music, it just seemed like a very natural progression, being a kid and liking the discovery of new music like hearing a new band or hearing a new kind of music for the first time, that sort of sense of novelty and discovery I think is really important to me and then starting to realize how some music was all about that but staying present and about being exclusive to that moment where like other music you can play the same song over and over again and it would be about the same. That really was attracted to me especially in improvised music.

So, I met a guitar like this one probably 10 years ago. It's a Gibson ES-150D I believe. That must have been an ES-150DC. I've seen it marked both ways in the books. It's basically a 335 that's twice as thick, so it's like a 175 or any number of other big old Gibson boxes.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

What I know about these guitars is they were manufactured starting in late 1968 so they're like model year '69, '70, and '71. Usually, the ES-150 is the Charlie Christian guitar which is a thinner body and generally smaller and it's got one floating pickup, a much more traditional looking guitar. There are other guitars like this that are special order ES-335's or really 330's because there's no block of wood in the middle. You probably can't see in there with the camera but yeah it's completely -- it's actually hollow as opposed to 335's which are like a 2 x 4 with two hollow wings on the sides, so it really resonates like hollow stuff, an acoustic...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

...enough that in some improvised instruments I can be playing like it gets...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

...really quiet I can --

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

I don't know if that's picking up or not but yeah I do I mean I can come across that sort of stuff. With a clarinet player or a with a trumpet player of getting quiet, I can get super quiet and still have it sound like something at all.

I don't -- I guess they made it in three colors. They all had humbuckers. They all had this weird volume knob on the lower bout here like a Gretsch or like -- I guess Gretschs are the ones that mostly do that or some Guilds do the same thing too which I guess would be the idea that you can do this thing...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

...that sort of fades up there but, you know, so it's like a master volume and then pickup volumes and tone like normal Gibson so it’s a little something for this knob.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

When I met the guitar, I said, "Oh, that looks cool. I'll play that," so I picked it up and when I put my hands on it, it just like it sat in exactly the right spot. I put my right hand in the right spot and my left hand in the right spot and it felt really natural. I'm a big, enormous dude, and just playing double bass feels really right so it's a big enormous thing, and playing guitar has always felt a little bit like I was grabbing, I guess, it was too small and I sort of pinch my arms in or whatever, and so this guitar felt really natural, and when I met it I didn't have the bread to get it, and years go by and I think it was the Wall Street Journal but I can be mistaken. There was an article about things that outperform the stock market like early 2000s when the stock market went away for everybody, and one of the things that listed was collectible instruments, so, you know, banks have been investing and corporations have been investing in orchestral instruments for a hundred years, hundreds of years, like nobody in the orchestra owns their violin that they perform on. Nobody owns a Stradivarius. Well corporations own them. No musicians can afford them which is kind of cool but then it's also kind of like it seems like it's in the wrong hands, you know. So anyway, the collectible guitar market sort of exploded at that point so this guitar tripled in cost between my meeting it and falling in love with it and then trying to buy it. So, I was visiting a friend in Des Moines, Iowa...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

...and she said, "We should go to my friend's guitar shop," and I was like, "Great. We're totally going to meet my guitar and I'm not going to be able to do anything about it." She said, "Oh no. That guitar's so weird it's not going to be," so we walked in and this guitar that I'm holding in my hands is hanging on the wall. She was like, "See? There it is." Sucks for me, I get to meet it and not buy it. I talked to the guy who owned the shop a little bit, and this guitar was his friend's guitar, and they had played together in a band for 40 years, and the guy hadn't played it in 10 years, even playing smaller guitars, and he took it to the shop to sell under the stipulation that he not sell it to a collector. He had to sell it to somebody who's going to play it, and so he was standing and he was like, "Man, I will work with you. I will take little payments. This guy will be happy that you buy it so long as you promise to play it. If you don't play it, you can't have it. If I hear that you're not playing it, I will come back and get it from you. You have to play it. It will not sit under your bed. It does not go in a glass case. It does not get marked up. Sold again, you have to play it." So great. And the day I got back from that trip, I got a call about like a recording session that would pay me to do it, which never happens, and it was almost enough to pay for the guitar, so it was perfect synchronicity.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

That's one of my favorite tricks. The other guitar I had before me, the guy I bought it from, put on a shorter trapeze, which means that there's all this string back here, so I can do this for one...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING WITH A GIBSON ES-175D]

...which is really fun, but then you can do all this fun string bending behind the bridge, which is normally reserved for up here on guitars, and that has sort of gotten a bad rep from heavy metal guys.