I met Tom in the early 1980s, when he had been building guitars for about a decade and was already attracting a strong following among the young guitarists who were in the early years of their own careers ­players like David Starobin, Eliot Fisk, Sharon Isbin, David Leisner, Alice Artzt and the Assads.

I probably had a different sort of relationship with him than guitarists did: the guitar was my major instrument in school, but I had largely given up playing to work as a writer and critic. I was, however, writing a lot about the guitar and guitarists in those days, and had come to count on Tom, to a certain degree, to point out unusually interesting players who were just coming onto the radar.

Tom loved guitarists: he was constantly talking up new ones he heard, regardless whether they played his instruments, and he did a great deal behind the scenes to make things happen for players he was impressed with; in some cases, I suspect the beneficiaries never knew the lengths he had gone for them. Several times, I conducted interviews with guitarists at Tom's apartment on West 72nd Street, because that was where they were staying. (And Tom's parties were epic.)

He also, of course, loved the guitar itself, and we used to have long phone conversations about his frustrations with the instrument ­ it's quiet voice and its lack of sustain, mainly ­ and his plans to conquer those problems. Some of his ideas were a little far out, but Tom was nothing if not imaginative. Once, around 1983, he described plans he had to build a guitar with several spring-action finger levers that would either sustain or dampen the guitar's sound, much as the piano's pedals do for that instrument. He wasn't entirely clear on exactly how this would work: my notes from those conversations allude to "a high tensile plastic frame inside the guitar."

Eventually he gave up this idea ­ as well as talk of putting a small amplifier inside the guitar ­ and began to talk about something new: changing the shape of the guitar's body in a way that would yield better projection and clarity. I also vividly remember the day he called to say he had decided what to call this new model: the Millennium. The rest, as they say, is history.

But central to Tom's accomplishment with the Millennium was his belief that the guitar itself should not be romanticized. Yes, he loved the artistry in what he did, and the guitars he made are as magnificent to look at as they are to hear. But as he told me one day, "Don't get caught up in that 'The guitar, she is a woman' thing. A guitar is like a shovel. It's a tool. It's just that it's used to make music, so it's easy to forget that it's a tool."

I did play one of his guitars for a while. Tom had one, in the pre-Millennium days, that he didn't think sounded right. He asked me to take it home and play it in, in the hope that it would improve once the wood was moving regularly. In truth, I wasn't playing a lot in those days, and although I loved playing that instrument, which sounded better than any other guitar I'd owned, a lot of the time it sat in the corner in its case. When he eventually took it back, he still disliked the sound, and I figured I just hadn't done the job he assigned me well enough. As it turned out, it wasn't my fault: when Tom took the guitar apart, he found a block of wood that he had glued in temporarily and forgot to remove: once he did, the sound blossomed. (Looking back, I really should have bought that one. But I think it was spoken for.)

In the 1990s we gradually lost touch, for the usual reasons ­ families, moving to other places, having too much to do. Now and then we checked in by phone, and I'd occasionally run into him at a concert. The last time was at the New York Guitar Festival's Guitar Marathon at the 92nd Street Y. And true to form, he handed me discs by a couple of young guitarists he thought were pushing the boundaries. As always, he was funny, warm, generous and energetic. I really will miss the guy.

---Allan Kozinn, music critic, The New York Times 

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New York Times Obituary