Courageous Contours: The History of the Fender Jazzmaster

In 1958, Fender launched the Jazzmaster guitar with the goal of striking a one-two blow: to appeal to serious jazz guitarists, a genre of musician that had previously escaped Fender’s expanding market, and to be the company’s top-of-the-line replacement for the Telecaster and Stratocaster models.

Despite not being a success in those particular areas, the unusual guitar—first Fender’s offset model—surprised everyone by becoming quite popular in other, more unexpected areas. It really accomplished this more than once, serving as the standard guitar during the 1960s golden age of surf music, a sleek and affordable piece of equipment for new wave musicians in the 1970s, and finally an iconic and adaptable guitar for the alternative and indie rock scene.

The Jazzmaster is longer and heavier due to its offset-waist design, which makes the guitar more pleasantly playable and balanced while seated. It is sleekly curvy and curved like a Stratocaster.

The original Jazzmaster was the first Fender instrument to have two distinct tone circuits, and it featured a floating bridge/anchored tailpiece design, floating vibrato and tremolo-locking system, and distinctive single-coil pickups connected into a completely new control arrangement.

On the upper horn, the darker, mellower rhythm circuit featured its own passive tone and volume controls in the shape of inset tone wheels that were positioned next to the slider switch. The Jazzmaster’s bridge pickup, pickup switch, and lower-bout controls were disabled in the rhythm circuit mode, leaving only the neck pickup and the upper-horn inset wheels functional.

The tone generated by the Jazzmaster in lead-circuit mode with the pickup switch set to neck pickup alone is substantially lighter than the rhythm circuit tone, which is once again neck pickup-only. The potentiometers for the lower-bout “lead” tone control and the upper-horn “rhythm” tone control have different electrical values, which accounts for the obvious difference in the two neck-pickup-only tones.

The Jazzmaster is a stunning, uncommon, and elaborate Fender guitar in both sound and style thanks to all of these remarkable design aspects.