The ventures
When I think about things I want, I tend to hit on categories like “sleep” or “for the yard work to go away,” but sometimes J. helps me think of objects, and when it gets to that point the objects might as well come home. Guitars have been appearing in the bedroom, mostly Telecasters, necks all in a row like an ash forest grown up overnight and quietly waiting to find out what it was planted for. Now we have a basswood interloper (genus Tilia, Coleridge’s lime) in the shape of a Jazzmaster.
It was made in Japan in the mid-nineties, right when I was taking high school Japanese because everyone seemed to think that was how you would get a job in 2000. I should have known how the guitar was going to behave, given that I grew up with those Sonic Youth and Elvis Costello records, but it is not the animal you expect when you first plug it in. A Gibson is an oil painting and the Telecasters draw in pastel, but a Jazzmaster does its work in thin tempera washes; stroke broad or thin, the light always shows through. It is just remarkable once you get used to fiddling with all the extra metal bits which were upmarket features in the fifties and must have a hand in that transparency, but are perfect little devils to set up.
Marc Ribot’s impressive performances with offsets notwithstanding, I still understand the genre of a Jazzmaster to be “anything but jazz.” Yet it makes scales ring so clearly, and really makes me want to become a better lead player. I have a modes book somewhere in the basement, which I hardly ever looked at, because once you understand that a mode is just a change of context how do you keep it interesting? The moment I leaned over to fiddle with a pedal, the guitar started to feed back as advertised. You know what to do—divebomb that tremolo! “You should have seen your face,” said J.
