Fender Jazz Bass
Two pickups, an offset waist, and a neck that made the Precision feel like a plank.
Overview
Fender's own 1962 catalog copy didn't hedge: the Jazz Bass arrived as "Fender's newest addition to the field of electric basses," billed as "the standards by which others will be compared." That's marketing, and marketing always talks like that. But the design underneath was doing something different from the Precision that came before it. Two pickups, each with two pole pieces per string, each with its own volume control, feeding a shared tone control. Tandem volume knobs let a player blend the bridge and neck pickups against each other. That gave a range of bass tones the single-pickup Precision couldn't reach. The catalog promised "wide bass tone selection," and the layout delivered it.
The neck was the other half of the pitch. Fender described a "new faster-action neck with rosewood finger-board and adjustable truss-rod," and players coming from the Precision noticed the difference right away. Carol Kaye, writing in Mix-Magazine (November 1984, p.86), said why she stayed with the Precision: the Jazz's narrow neck was "too crampy" for her hand, and she never cared for its sound either. The Jazz Bass wasn't universally loved on arrival. It was a different instrument with a different feel, and plenty of working bassists preferred what they already had.
The design did offer ergonomics. The body carried Fender's offset waist - patent pending at the time of that 1962 copy - which sat against the player's body differently than a symmetric body would. The back was contoured, the upper bout was cut away for access to the higher frets, and the whole thing was shaped so the player's arm fell naturally over the strings.
The hardware followed Fender's usual pattern of making everything adjustable. Individual bridge sections could be set for both string length and string height, so intonation and action were dialed in per string instead of as a compromise across all four. The truss rod kept the neck serviceable, and later documentation describes a "Bullet" truss rod adjusting nut on the headstock - a half-inch Allen wrench through the bullet nut corrects a bowed or concave neck, no disassembly required. The same later manual describes a tilt-neck "Micro" adjustment that changes neck angle with a 3/32 Allen wrench through the neck plate. It moves the strings closer to or further from the fretboard without touching the truss rod at all. That makes two separate systems for the same problem.
By the early 1980s, Fender was treating the Jazz Bass as a heritage object. Mix-Magazine (March 1982, p.67) reported that the company was bringing out a series of detailed replicas of vintage guitars and basses - five instruments including the '62 Jazz Bass, alongside '57 and '62 Stratocasters and '57 and '62 Precision basses.
The instrument's later life ran through a lot of different hands. A Squier version appeared by the mid-1980s with two J-style pickups, one tone and two volume controls, a 20-fret 34-inch rosewood fretboard, four-bolt neck attachment, and a basswood body with chrome open-back machine heads. It was an affordable entry point with the same basic layout. By the 2000s the Jazz Bass was in Fender's Highway 1 line of "affordable, no-nonsense, American-made instruments," with EQ-Magazine (April 2003, p.71) listing the expanded series at $599.97 and $629.97. Players modified them too: DB-Magazine (July 1986, p.18) listed a Fender Jazz Bass with EMG pickups in one studio's equipment roster. And EQ-Magazine (September 2007, p.36) had Neil Peart tracking with both a fretless Jaco Pastorius Tribute Bass and a Fender Custom Shop Jazz Bass.
The wiring documentation from a late-1990s service sheet shows the standard Jazz Bass control assembly with a .05 MFD capacitor, neck and bridge pickup leads in yellow and black, and a bridge ground. Nothing exotic.
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