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Fender announce the release of two Sonic Youth Signature Jazzmasters.
Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore have always heavily customised their Jazzmasters, removing all unneccessary controls and stripping them back to their essentials, leaving just a 3-way switch and volume knob. These two instruments are similar, yet in almost every way, pickups, bridge, frets and pickguard, they are completely different. "After playing Fender Jazzmasters for the last 20 plus years we are totally psyched and honoured to have our very own signature axes".
Jazzmaster 50th Anniversary
Fender introduced the Jazzmaster in 1958 as a high-end alternative to its omnipresent 1950s elder siblings, the Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars. Curvaceously sleek and boasting an abundance of controls and chrome, the Jazzmaster became an unexpected hit with youthful players who were blazing new trails in surf and garage pop music. Well more than a decade later, the Jazzmaster was rediscovered be new generations of edgy new guitarists who loved its great looks, versatile sound, affordable price and subversive cool. The guitar continued to attract those who dared to be different; the boundary pushers and the up-and-coming fringe talent.
Even a brief look at the instrument’s 50 years shows that whenever rock music experienced major stylistic shifts, the underdog Jazzmaster was always right there, be it surf, punk, new wave, goth, shoe-gaze, grunge, indie or any other subgenre in which the guitar was prized, the guitar remains a star instrument in the Fender galaxy.
Fender Jazzmaster History
Fender unveiled its Jazzmaster guitar in 1958, intending to score a one-two punch with an instrument that would be the company's top-of-the line successor to the Stratocaster guitar and appeal to serious jazz guitarists, a class of musician that had eluded Fender's widening reach. Although it succeeded on neither count, the distinctive Jazzmaster nonetheless surprised everybody by reaching widespread success in some unexpected arenas.
Of course, jazz was the high-minded province of the hollow-body arch-top guitar. Fender wanted to prove that an affordably modern solid-body electric guitar could supplant these expensive old-world instruments, and the successor to the Stratocaster would be designed accordingly. The result was the Jazzmaster.
It was a striking instrument. While clearly a Fender guitar, the Jazzmaster bore little resemblance to the Stratocaster and none at all to the Telecaster. Although sleekly curvaceous and contoured like the former, the Jazzmaster was longer and heavier than its predecessors because of a feature previously unseen in a Fender instrument-an offset-waist body that made the guitar more comfortably playable and balanced while seated (as jazz guitarists preferred); a design element used two years later on the phenomenally successful Jazz Bass guitar. Its horns were less pronounced and its pickguard more angular than the Stratocaster's, and its two large rectangular pickups and plethora of knobs and switches gave it an atomic-age look that was just right with Sputnik beeping overhead and movies full of robots.
The Jazzmaster was a versatile guitar and it did produce mellower sounds, but it didn't fulfill Fender's original intent for the instrument-it did not top the Stratocaster and it was not embraced by jazz guitarists. Why not? It was a well-built guitar with good feel, modern visual appeal and a variety of tones suitable for many styles of music.
The answer was perhaps twofold. First, jazz guitarists simply didn't like it. This was most likely because while Fender could innovate right through the roof all day long if it wanted to, a solid body electric guitar was just never going to sound as smooth and mellow as a big hollow-body acoustic/electric jazz box.
Second, Leo Fender's first two guitars were so innovative, so brilliantly designed and so uncannily 'right' that any company-including Fender itself would have been hard pressed to top them. The Telecaster, eight years old by 1958, was already a de rigueur instrument in a working guitarist's arsenal, and its successor, the Stratocaster, had been perfected by 1957 into a remarkably stylish and efficient combination of form and function that was forcefully starting to lead a small but growing musical revolution.
Then something unexpected happened: the Fender Jazzmaster became a success anyway. It started to sell,not just to customers Fender and Randall originally envisioned for it; quite the opposite, in fact. The Jazzmaster appeared prominently in several of Fender's famous "You won't part with yours either" ads of the late '50s and '60s, which were smartly devised by Fender's Robert Perine to appeal specifically to teenagers.
Jazzmasters seemed to fall from favour during the 1970s as the popularity of surf music waned and many mainstream rock guitarists opted for humbucking pickup sounds and greater sustain. Interestingly though, by the late 1970s, the Jazzmaster's unfashionable, bargain-basement status made it very affordable, and several young musicians who disdained rock's more bloated excesses easily got their hands on them just as Fender was preparing to discontinue the model (which it did in 1980). Television guitarist Tom Verlaine and edgy U.K. songsmith Elvis Costello resurrected the Jazzmaster as a cult instrument, giving it a new lease on life as a credibly cool punk/new wave guitar.
Fender reintroduced the Jazzmaster in 1986 as a Japanese 1962 reissue model, and the model's late-'70s punk cred set the stage for its adoption by the U.S. grunge/indie rock explosion of the 1990s. Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J Mascis was also a highly popular and influential player whose own signature Jazzmaster model appeared in 2007. Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain and Cure leader Robert Smith often played the model.
The American Vintage '62 Jazzmaster was introduced in 1999. By that time there was an even longer list of prestigious Jazzmaster players, and today they are still found in the capable hands of Costello, Moore, Ranaldo and Mascis, plus artists such as Nels Cline (Wilco), Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (My Bloody Valentine), Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd (the Flaming Lips), Tim Gane (Stereolab), Aaron North (Nine Inch Nails) and Mike Einziger (Incubus).
Pre-order Sonic Youth Signature Jazzmasters from Digital Village online, in-store or via telephone mail-order. Contact any DV store for Fender Jazzmaster