Retro-Rama
1964 Fender Jazz Bass
The Fender Jazz Bass was Leo Fender’s second great contribution to the emerging bass guitar world in the late ’50s and early ’60s. As with the Precision Bass I wrote about in November ’05, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the Jazz in the pantheon of immortal electric bass designs. It was my great pleasure to check out this beautiful example of mid-’60s Jazzdom—it sounds as good as it looks.
Fender made a few changes in the Precision’s design after its 1951 introduction, before it reached its classic design in the late ’50s. The Jazz Bass, though, appeared on the scene in a more fully evolved state when it emerged in late 1960. The body was sleek, the neck was thin, and most important, the two-pickup design gave the player a whole new universe of tones. Even though the dual single-coil pickups are somewhat susceptible to hum individually, the noise goes away when you turn both pickups all the way up, as this essentially puts it into humbucking mode. The first Jazz Basses had concentric knobs with one volume and one tone control for each pickup, but the electronics evolved into a simpler two-volume, one tone-control design two years before this bass was made in 1964. This one was built a year or so before the sale of Fender to CBS, and it could be said that it represents the peak period of original Fender basses.
This instrument is in wonderful shape, and therefore is worth over $10,000 on the current market—unbelievable when you consider that it originally cost just a few hundred bucks a little over 40 years ago. It has the classic Fender Candy Apple Red finish, which has taken on a wonderful translucent quality over the years, and of course the matching headstock is always a classy look. The chrome bridge cover and pickup cover are still in place, and they do look ever-so-cool—even if many players (myself included) prefer to take them off, in order to have a wider right-hand placement area and better access to the bridge for palm muting and other on-the-spot adjustments.
Like all Fender basses made throughout the early and mid ’60s, this ’64 has a rosewood fingerboard. It’s also equipped with flatwound strings, which really bring out the smooooth factor in its tone, especially when you favor the front (neck) pickup. The flats give it a gorgeous woody thump, but they’re also punchy and articulate. I used the bass on a session for an old-school Muscle Shoals-style mid-tempo R&B song, and the sound was perfect: round and fat, but with sweet and clear upper mids. I suddenly found myself playing a somewhat busier-than-normal groove with plenty of middle- and upper-register fills in a way that I might normally avoid. Like any truly great bass, the instrument was playing me rather than the other way around! I use roundwounds on my own ’62 P-Bass, which to my ear emphasize the midrange bark in its pickup—but for the classic ’60s sound, it’s hard to beat a J-Bass with flats. True to Leo’s concept, the neck is fast, and the range of tones you can get by varying the knob settings is astounding. As in many basses of that era, the tone control is very useable from 0 to 10 and all points in between. Depending on whether you’re playing with a pick or your fingers (not to mention the size and style of your band), you need to get varying amounts of treble response from your bass, and on a Jazz Bass the simplest way to change this is to tweak the tone control. To my ears, many “modern” basses have a much narrower range of passive tone-control settings, for reasons I have never quite understood.
There are so many great bass players of the electric era who have played Jazz Basses, I hesitate to list them for fear of leaving anyone out. Having said that, Joe Osborn was one of the early pioneers of the Jazz Bass sound, playing his ’60 Jazz on countless recordings in Los Angeles and Nashville. Joe uses the neck pickup almost exclusively (hum be damned!), and at one point he left the same flatwound strings on his bass for over 20 years. And of course, Jaco Pastorius took the Jazz Bass to a whole new place when he pulled the frets out of his bass, covered the fingerboard with epoxy, threw on a set of roundwounds, and revolutionized our instrument’s vocabulary forever.
The Fender Jazz is a true classic and has remained a living, breathing part of the history of the electric bass. Leo Fender’s original design has endured many tweaks and variations as well as countless imitators, and it still rocks. So if you happen to find an early-’60s mint-condition Jazz Bass under your uncle’s bed, offer him twice what he paid for it—and know that you just made the best financial decision of your life!
