Leo Fender had all but locked up the country and early rock-and-roll electric guitar market when he decided to venture into the jazz-guitar field and give the various hollow-bodied archtops a run for their money. In 1958, he introduced the Fender Jazzmaster, with its large, contoured, “off-waist” body, designed to appeal to jazz guitarists, who often played sitting down. It’s white-covered pickups were unlike Fender’s other single coils, in that they were wound flat and wide, as opposed to the Strat, Tele, and Jaguar pickups, which use tall, thin coils. This was meant to give them a warmer, jazz-like tone without losing the clarity associated with Fender single coils.

Though the Jazzmaster does have a slightly mellower sound than the Strat, it was never embraced by jazz musicians. Instead, it became emblematic of surf rock, with icons of the genre like The Ventures and The Fireballs cementing its association with the sounds of the California beaches. West Coast instrumental music fell out of fashion in the late Sixties, as budding rockers began to prefer the fatter tone of Eric Clapton’s Gibson humbuckers and the more malleable tremolo of Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocaster. By 1980 Fender ceased to offer the Jazzmaster model.

The Eighties Alternative
No sooner had Fender stopped production of the Jazzmaster than alternative rockers like Tom Verlaine of Television, Elvis Costello, and Sonic Youth decided that it was their guitar of choice. They were attracted by the combination of its unique sound, which helped set their new music apart from that which came before, and its rejection by the historic “dinosaur” bands that they in turn had rejected. This rebuff by mainstream musicians had the additional advantage of making used Jazzmasters much more affordable than the already collectible and more popular Les Pauls, Strats, Teles, and 335s.

Thus began a tradition of Jazzmasters showing up in the hands of guitarists who shunned the mainstream, like Robert Smith of The Cure, My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, experimentalist Nels Cline, and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus.

Cheap price and lack of collectability encouraged some of these artists to hack up their Jazzmasters, modifying them to their needs and tastes. J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr replaced the Jazzmaster’s often problematic bridge with a Tune-o-matic, while Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth replaced pickups and hardware with abandon in the search for their off-the-wall tonalities.

Recognizing the rise in popularity of this Fender classic, the company has paid tribute to some of the artists who placed it back in the public eye by offering signature models to J Mascis, Elvis Costello, Lee Ranaldo, and Thurston Moore (only the Ranaldo and Moore models are still available).

Fender Japan got the message in the late ‘80s and began to reissue the Jazzmaster; American players were forced to deal with rising vintage prices, or to track down the rare import. A 1996 Squier version sported a pair of humbuckers and a Strat-style vibrato bridge, but it was not until the new millennium that Jazzmaster aficionados could buy anything like the original from Fender.

The Mexico-made, Classic Player Series Jazzmaster looks much like the original, but, ala J Mascis, replaces the bridge with a Tune-o-matic type, and uses specially designed high-output, P-90-type single-coil pickups. The pricey American Vintage '62 Jazzmaster is the sole model currently offered that nails the original specs for vintage purists. Until now Fender hasn’t offered anything to those who like the Jazzmaster body style and vibrato system, but aren’t yet ready to shell out over a grand.

Back in Blacktop
The new Fender Blacktop Series is a medium-priced Mexican-made line that adds humbucker power to Fender Stratocaster, Telecaster, Jaguar, and Jazzmaster models. The Blacktop Jazzmaster (reviewed here) is the only one that doesn’t come with two humbuckers, rather adding a Duncan Designed single-coil, Jazzmaster neck pickup to its high-gain humbucking bridge pickup (see Fig. 1).

Fig 1: A new combination of pickups for the Jazzmaster.

The Blacktop Jazzmaster retains all the visual style of the vintage models as well as their 25.5-inch scale length. A gloss urethane finish coats a beefy, yet comfortable maple neck, topped with a rosewood fretboard and 21 medium jumbo frets. Its 9.5-inch radius maintains a classic feel while allowing clear bending.

The Blacktop Jazzmaster veers from the original in various ways with varying results. The heavy-duty tuners are a step-up from the Klusons in ruggedness, if not authenticity. The absence of the extra tone and volume controls mounted on the upper bout of the classic Jazzmaster may be missed by a few fans of knob twiddling. Skirted black amp knobs are a new appointment on all the Blacktop models and work quite well on this sunburst Jazzmaster, blending into its black pickguard (see Fig. 2). The traditional tremolo lock, which would secure the whammy in place in the event that you broke a string, is gone. (Fender continues to erroneously call the vibrato arm a tremolo arm, so to avoid confusion I will too.)

Fig 2: Just two controls on this axe.

Love at First Play
Before unpacking the Blacktop Jazzmaster, I had never spent much time in this end of the Fender pool. Playing largely country, blues, and commercial pop had kept me in the Tele and Strat area. From the first few notes I picked, this guitar made me rethink my guitar needs.

The test model came strung with .009s and a low action, making someone like yours truly, who is used to .010s and a high action, feel like the guitar playing equivalent of Superman. Despite the light strings and low action, the guitar showed no signs of buzzing or fretting out, anywhere on the neck.

Plugging in to an Egnater Rebel 30 and an Orange Tiny Terror revealed a bridge pickup that provided plenty of punch, without being muddy when used for clean sounds. The neck pickup offered a completely different tonality, whipping the guitar from dark cream to bright blues or spanky funk with the flick of the three-way toggle. Amazingly, when using the two pickups together, the humbucker did not overpower the much weaker single-coil, possibly because the neck pickup’s treble response helped it cut through. Whatever the reason, they sounded great together.

The more I played the Blacktop Jazzmaster, the more I loved it. The trick was to not expect it to be a Stratocaster or a Telecaster. The closest guitar that I own is a DiPinto Galaxie, which uses a Jazzmaster-style bridge. When I got that guitar, I realized that the nature of the string tension on an instrument with this type of bridge and vibrato arm requires more pressure to bend strings than does a Stratocaster or Telecaster. With copious string bending being essential to country playing and blues, it became clear why neither genre ever embraced the Jazzmaster. Don’t get me wrong, this bridge assembly is fine for the milder bending of many rock genres, it is just not ideal for blues and country’s whole-tone-and-beyond string stretching.

The Blacktop Jazzmaster arrived at exactly the right time: I had recently decided to excise blues and country bending from my playing in an attempt to create a more modern sound. Where this system excels is Bigsby-style rocking and avant-garde picking behind the bridge. But bending and rocking aside, I discovered that this bridge and tailpiece lent a distinctive sound to the instrument; producing cool clanging metallic overtones caused by string resonances at certain fret positions. They were not dissonant, and far from a fault, they gave the Jazzmaster a unique character, as well as adding extra aggressiveness to my distorted tones.

Unfortunately, just like the original bridges, the one on the Blacktop tended to rattle, due to loose height adjustment screws (fixable with some Loctite); and the combination of low tension, created by the minimal angle of the strings across the bridge, with the shallow saddle slots can make the strings jump out of their saddles with aggressive attack.

Changing the strings to my usual .010s, and raising the action more to my taste, mitigated this effect somewhat. I felt a little less like Superman, but found the Blacktop Jazzmaster was still a pleasure to play, needing only an expected intonation fix, but no truss rod adjustment—a tribute to the stability of the neck.

All That Jazz
If you are looking for singing sustain at low gain settings go for the Blacktop Telecaster. If you want a dive bomb-ready whammy, the Blacktop Stratocaster is more your meat. But if your musical tastes run a little more off the beaten track, the Blacktop Jazzmaster is for you. Its beefy humbucker will manhandle gain channels, as well as overdrive, distortion, and fuzz pedals. Its single-coil neck pickup has got blues if you want it, but with a bit of extra spank. And the eccentricities of its wang-bar offer a whole new world of tones.

For me, this one’s a keeper. I am looking forward to adding a bunch of new sounds to my tonal arsenal. Hell, I might even find myself cranking up the reverb and whipping out some surf.

Pros: Plays beautifully. Offers a wide range of alternative and vintage tones.

Cons: The traditional Jazzmaster bridge issues.

Michael Ross in a New York City-based guitarist/producer/music journalist. He contributes articles to Guitar Player, Premier Guitar, Guitar Edge, EQ, Sound On Sound, and Gearwire.com. He is the author of the Hal Leonard books Getting Great Guitar Sounds and All About Effects.