Although Wood has had a guitar in his hand since he was 7 years old, he never expected to have a career in the music industry. Throughout his teen years, Wood says, he was constantly taking guitars apart and putting them back together.

"I always dreamed about building instruments," he says. But when his father, a trombonist, would not pay for music school, Wood decided to pursue a business career instead.

Moving from his native New Jersey to Brockton, Mass., Wood attended Babson College. After graduation, his parents moved to California. His own cross-country move was sealed when he played tennis during a winter holiday visit to his parents. The accounting job offer in San Francisco for PricewaterhouseCoopers didn't hurt either.

Now 47 years old, Wood has been a chief financial officer for a host of companies, including VPNet Technologies, Solectron and NetManage. But it was his work with Intel that brought him back to his love of music and opened the doors to a new lifelong career.

In 1989, Wood was working for Intel in the Philippines and decided to take a sabbatical. He took up work at a nearby guitar factory, where an old guitar maker took him under his wing. For eight weeks Wood spent hours daily learning the methods and craft of guitar building. Over the next six months, he honed his technique.

Although Wood eventually made his way back to the United States, he maintained his ties with the Philippines and started a company, the Custom Guitar Company, that harvests and exports the famed abalone and mother of pearl pressed into solid square pieces for guitar inlay. For a time the company was in Sunnyvale but moved back to the Philippines when abalone became protected on the California coast. His shell inlay can be seen on numerous guitars, including those of Santana and B.B. King.

Wood is nostalgic about the Philippines, partly because of the origins of his company, but more so because he met his wife there. The couple now has two children, ages 10 and 12, and they visit the Philippines every year for six weeks.

Like most creative endeavors, guitar building is a labor of love. Beginning with just a solid block of dried wood, it is a matter of using circular saws, razor blades and sanders to shape and create the guitar piece by piece. The wood is then wetted and put into a mold. When the pieces are ready, they are carefully aligned and slowly glued together.

"It's hard work," he says. "Because it's as much sanding as it is building. You're carving by hand, and your fingers just ache. But that's the love that goes into it."

Love is certainly required, because if one piece cracks, even after all 20 hours of shaping just one portion of it, the builder is back to square one.

"When that happens, you just want to cry," he says.

In Wood's garage workshop, nearly every cabinet is spilling over with guitar necks, electric pieces, and blocks of wood that have been drying for more than 10 years. Wood says the material comes anywhere from Alaska to Europe, his favorites including maple and spruce. Above his workspace, a small collection of guitars hang on the wall, some dating back to the '20s and '30s. He plans to rebuild at least three of them if he ever gets the time.

Wood has won international recognition for his work, in particular the lavish abalone and pearl embellished Wah Wah Watson guitar and the blue archtop built for famed collector Scott Chinery.

The Wah Wah Watson guitar was built in 1996, after Watson had fallen in love with previous work Wood had done. The Watson guitar was in circulation for five years before being donated to JAMS, the Indonesian equivalent of the Hard Rock Cafe.

Guitar enthusiasts took notice of Wood's talents after the Watson guitar debuted. One of them was famed collector Scott Chinery. In 1997, Chinery commissioned Wood to build the 23rd blue archtop guitar for a collection to be shown at the Smithsonian, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the archtop guitar.

It took eight months for Wood to build the shining blue archtop, a distinctive model that is fat like an acoustic guitar, but shaped like a violin.

After spending the spring and summer months of 1998 at the Smithsonian, the guitar was donated and put up for auction by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Although Wood had been building for several years prior to the Watson and Chinery commissions, he did not have much experience with the archtop guitar. Thus, he went directly to archtop master builder Tom Ribbecke, who has been making instruments for 31 years.

Over seven weekend workshops, Ribbecke taught Wood essential archtop techniques. Ribbecke says the archtop is the "most daunting and difficult" guitar to play, as well as one of the finest. The archtop differs from most guitars because of the way it is built, allowing players to produce "lots of notes closely spaced together. It provides clarity with complex chords," Ribbecke says. "You don't have that kind of clarity with other guitars. You can hear every single note because of the shape of the archtop."

An archtop can last up to 400 years because of the craftsmanship required to build it. "That leaves me with a great sense of peace," Ribbecke says. "To know what I left on earth will affect people beyond me—it's a sobering and beautiful path to choose in life. It's why people get involved in archtop guitars."

Ribbecke says Wood naturally picked up the essentials to archtop building. "Len has a doggedness about him that we have all come to appreciate," he says of the archtop craftsman circle. "He is a true humanitarian with a great soul and a great heart. He has a great deal of patience and persistence. It took me 20 years to learn patience. Len has a gift for it, and the ability to bring humanity into these instruments."

In addition to being an emerging top-line guitar maker, Wood loves to play the guitar and has spread his artistic talents into creating a jazz band. The band is still in the works, a loose collective of friends and musicians who call themselves Blu Tools. Wood says the number of players will range from three to seven, depending on the occasion, and play a lot of improvised jazz composed by him and bandmates. Blu Tools will have its debut on May 17 and 18, when it plays at the Cardiff Lounge for the "Boogie on the Bayou" festival in downtown Campbell.

With his knowledge of guitar building and playing, Wood has also set out to help the community. To do this, he has dedicated his efforts to two music workshop programs, in order to encourage budding jazz artists.

For the past several months, Wood has teamed with renowned and dynamic trumpet player Eddie Gale to help with his jazz workshops. Gale holds workshops in San Jose once a week at San José State University and every three weeks in Oakland, supported by a grant from the California Arts Council.

Gale says Len naturally understood the importance of reaching out to aspiring players. "It is important for kids to have the sense that adults support them, and music is a natural place for doing that," Gale says. "He is able to get really nice sounds, very different, modern sounds. He is very talented and has wonderful ideas for playing guitar. He's a very youthful musician."

Although Wood says he loves his work with Gale's workshops, he felt the need to do more. In order to reach a broader range of students, Wood recently joined the JazzMasters Workshop, which has sparked much enthusiasm in him. On March 18, he became a board member for the workshop, which brings after-school programs to young musicians.

JazzMasters founder Bruce Forman is delighted to have Wood join the board. Wood's "knowledge of music, his ability to play, and his expertise in business bring a wonderful mix to our board of directors," Forman says. "I am very gratified that he has chosen to support our project."

Forman began the nonprofit program in 2001, and classes are now held weekly in Carmel, Mountain View, San Francisco and Oakland. New programs are beginning in Monterey, Los Angeles and New York City.

"Instead of being paid to play in a nightclub, I would rather play for free in a school any day. It's just a good thing to do," he says. "Music is a channel for kids. They develop through music, and these workshops give them a chance to learn."

Wood believes that the best music happens in a workshop setting because it is relaxed and dually advantageous. The older musicians are always hearing new things and thus keeping their sound fresh, while younger musicians can learn the standards and essentials of music.

"It teaches the kids teamwork, leadership, creativity and listening skills. Particularly in jazz you learn improvisation, discipline and theory," Wood says. "The more and more time I spend with music, the more I realize how important it is to people. Music is a safe and easy outlet to be creative, explore and connect."

Forman says Wood is "very helpful, and has great ideas—the kind of guy that makes stuff happen right away. He is a firm supporter of the idea of mentoring music and keeping it a part of kids' lives."

One reason for Wood's excitement about JazzMasters is the opportunity to build for its participants. Wood has taken it upon himself to build 30 guitars for disadvantaged children in the program. The guitars will be smaller and lighter than usual to better accommodate the young musicians. He is supporting the effort with funds from his Custom Guitar Company profits.

"It is pretty hard to make a living at this," Ribbecke says. "But I see Len constantly reach out and help people around him and take no credit. He has a gift for guitar-making. I don't know where his gift will eventually lead him, but I feel he wants to use it to help people. I think that's the reason he is working for JazzMasters. It's a beautiful thing."

Wood does become slightly uncomfortable when dishing on the countries he has played in, the musicians he knows and the acclaim he has received. He appears most at ease when speaking about his motivation to reach others with his art and encourage the love of music in young students.

"I don't want to just sit around or play golf," he says. "I want to play music and build instruments for these kids. I like music; I'm not in it for the economics. I want to help kids grow with music because it helped me grow."

For more information about the JazzMasters Workshop, visit www.jazzmastersworkshop.org.