Fender’s “Accidental” Guitar at 50
A report from the Jazzmaster® guitar 50th anniversary party/concert in New York, Sept. 12, 2008

Jazzmaster masters (from left): Lee Ranaldo, Jimmy Ripp, Tom Verlaine, Nels Cline, J Mascis and Thurston Moore. Photo by Amanda Schwab

When Tom Verlaine released the first note from his Jazzmaster at the Knitting Factory in New York, it was as though Fender’s accidental guitar had finally come full circle to realize its original purpose. Playing with guitarist Jimmy Ripp, Verlaine conjured a post-jazz sound as distinct as the post-punk stylings he originated with his band, Television.

Together the duo built a storm of sound punctuated with lightning sharp arpeggios interspersed with flash thundering chords that stunned the standing-room crowd into a state of awed silence. After palpable beats of delay, a crescendo of wild applause. Closing your eyes and listening closely to the crisp, drawn guitar exchanges and audience response, it was easy to imagine being at Small’s or the Blue Note or any one of the legendary jazz clubs farther uptown.

Originally introduced in 1958, the Jazzmaster was supposed to do for jazz what the Stratocaster® and Telecaster® guitars were doing for rock ‘n’ roll. The plan didn’t quite work out that way—the instrument was largely ignored by players who stuck to their traditional hollow body guitars. Yet somehow through the actions and reactions of unintended forces, the Jazzmaster guitar inspired sound and influence that is arguably as profound and certainly as eccentric as its better-selling brothers. Over the course of its 50-year history, the Jazzmaster has been at the core of an eclectic and influential cross-section of musical genres ranging from surf to punk to new wave to electronic and indie and alternative.

To celebrate the Jazzmaster’s esteemed vintage and eclectic place in rock ‘n’ roll history, Fender assembled Verlaine, J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr.), Nels Cline (of Wilco) and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) to perform on a single bill on Friday, Sept. 12 (see photo gallery below). Played by these modern masters, the guitar’s full spectrum of subtle nuance and fuzzed-out blaring sound was showcased to maximum effect.

The concert opened and closed with full-bore rocking sets. Long Island-based rock band Edison Glass started the evening with songs that drove and jangled as if pushed by the ghosts of the Strokes being tasered by the Police. The indie outfit seemed to understand that in the darkness of the crowd, guitar heroes were lurking in every corner, and stepped up to pay bold homage. The evening ended with Mascis playing his signature model Jazzmaster through a wall of amps. The amplitude tested the aural fortitude of the crowd yet destroyed a sound barrier they’d been waiting all evening to see eviscerated.

Supported by drummer Kyle Spence and Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools, Mascis sang in a sonorous timbre that was accentuated by his distorted riffs and sculpted leads, which swerved the line between in and out of control. Over a three-song set, the power trio delivered rising, racing rapturous lines in which Mascis expertly and extensively traveled the landscape of the Jazzmaster’s extended neck with an easy and almost laconic style that drew sharp contrast to the blurring sound he liberated.

Short, controlled bursts: Ranaldo and Moore onstage at the Knitting Factory, Sept. 12, 2008. Photo by Amanda Schwab

“Abandoned control” was a theme for the evening, and with it the other headliners took an improvisational approach. After Verlaine’s haunting mixolydian performance, Moore and Ranaldo used their stripped-down versions of the guitar to channel frequencies that seemed to build and hover together in the stage-lit air of the tight venue. When their fingers proved unsuitable for achieving the next level of dissonance, the musicians used tuning forks and drumsticks and invisible waves of amplifier feedback to find a place where only they existed and the crowd was merely a witness to a vigilante act of total release.

Nels Cline, together with painter Norton Wisdom (both men also perform in Mike Watt/Steve Perkins supergroup Banyan), again channeled jazz by nodding to the Kerouac-ian construct of mixed media jam collaborations. Guided by Cline’s pitch changing, cliff drop chords and horn-like noodling, Wisdom threw latex paint onto a backlit clear plastic panel that looked like an overhead projector gone to psychedelics. Following the continuum of Cline’s random explosions that fiercely went nowhere fast (and then faster, faster), Wisdom’s collection of painted images flashed in a wild variety that morphed from offshore oil wells to damsels seduced by princes to galactic bodies shifting from stars to moons, only to be disappeared in one swift squeegee motion when the “inspiration” ended and the last sustained note drifted off.

Walking out into the rainy night air after the show, you could almost hear the collection of Jazzmaster artists and their music circling the TriBeCa neighborhood. Across the Hudson, the pitch of Yo La Tengo seemed to float in from their Hoboken home. You could hear the last notes of Luna playing their final concert at Irving Plaza, and from across the pond My Bloody Valentine appeared and experimented with gleeful harmonic convergence. And not far away through the rising swell in the Rockaways, you could imagine the waves finding synchronicity with the early Jazzmaster reverb and tremolo of the Ventures.

In many ways the evening was a séance in which those who live in this other world of the Jazzmaster, with the right imagination, came together in the collective cloud of notes and sustain and found one shared sound. In variation, all were united by a space-age instrument imagined for one purpose. Yet through its own random path, and delivered through the hands of rock legends of a different order, it became something more.


The Jazzmaster is this secret weapon that a lot of us have loved in the underground. You never used to see them. Now it’s like we’re coming into this new age of the Jazzmaster.

We had dozens of dozen guitars in our ranks at any given time and dozens and dozens coming and going from our arsenal. Somehow when we picked up the Jazzmaster, it slowly started clearing away all the other ones and there became more Jazzmasters in our guitar racks and fewer and fewer of anything else because it had everything you wanted in a guitar. – Lee Ranaldo


That first Jazzmaster was the only guitar I had and I wrote all the songs on the first couple of albums with it. I use the whammy a lot. There is no other whammy that feels like that and I really built my style and songs on that guitar.

There is something about the guitar that has all these bells and whistles that can be used for drive and feedback and sonic audio. The original intent was to be clean and sharp. But fully distorted and blown out it is also super crisp. – J Mascis



Check out our photo gallery from Fender's Jazzmaster® guitar 50th anniversary party below!