Putting together this month’s feature on Fender offsets and their various offshoots, vintage and modern, you can’t help but think how many guitars were designed for one thing but ended up being famous for another. The Les Paul was, after all, designed as a suave jazz guitar – but gained fame and popularity only after it made Marshalls howl. Likewise, has there ever been a more gloriously misnamed electric than the Jazzmaster? Off the top of my head, I can think of more jazz players who used a Telecaster (such as Ed Bickert or, in more recent times, Julian Lage) than a Jazzmaster, and though I did find some interesting footage on YouTube of Joe Pass playing a Jaguar (oh, the irony!), it seems that the jazz hardcore weren’t impressed with Leo’s genre-specific toy. Jazzmasters and scuzzy distortion, though? Everyone from Thurston Moore to Kevin Shields and J Mascis comes to mind.
No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and Leo Fender’s attempt to offer jazz players a refined tool for creating urbane melodies eventually got used to tear down the masonry of popular music like an SDS drill during the grunge era. But that probably says something healthy about music – it is a slippery thing that defies attempts to confine it.
But even as we recognise how offsets became a key part of the New Wave scene and then grunge and finally post-rock, it’s healthy to remember that Leo’s designs still have room to keep transforming. Any
