Epiphone pulls a (white) rabbit out of the hat to honour Jack Casady with signature fretless bass

Epiphone has unveiled a new signature bass guitar for Jack Casady, the legendary co-founder of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.

Casady is a true icon. Not only is he a card carrying member of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, he is Epiphone’s longest-standing signature artist, which is a piece of Epiphone trivia that we did not even think of until today. And yet, when you think of the Jack Casady Bass, it feels like it has been around forever.

The design is timeless. There is that semi-hollow build, with the asymmetrical dual cutaway, the 2x2 headstock and single-pickup design. We have known and loved various iterations of this bass over the years, and it has remained a popular choice – owing to a super-versatile yet simple electronics.

This, however, is a twist on the original, with Epiphone giving it the fretless treatment for the first time ever.

Here we have a laurel fingerboard, with a 12” radius, topping a C profile mahogany neck that is glued to an archtop body of layered maple on top, back and sides, with single-ply binding applied to the top and back. The neck and headstock have been left unbound, and there is something pleasingly old-school and minimal about the design.

There is the cream pickguard with the embossed “E” Epiphone logo, contrasting nicely with the Aged Royal Tan finish looking very much like a plain-top Iced Tea Burst. There are gold speed knobs for volume and tone, but is the ring-mounted black chickenhead dial that pulls focus. Just what exactly is this for?

In practical terms, it makes this single-humbucker four-string a much more versatile instrument than it looks, offering a three-way impedance switch to tease out every bit of tone from that Casady-designed JCB-1 Low-Impedance Humbucker.

You could use this for jazz, blues, for rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, punk, and more besides. We would not expect anything less from an instrument built to Casady’s specifications.

His musical journey has taken the scenic route, soundtracking the ‘60s with Jefferson Airplane, forming US blues-rockers Hot Tuna with fellow Jefferson Airplane alumnus Jorma Kaukonen in ’69 – a project that survives to this day – and later playing in SVT, Jefferson Starship, and releasing music under his own name. He even played bass on Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile, from Electric Ladyland.

The Epiphone Jack Casady signature bass might have taken its cues from a 1972 Gibson Les Paul Signature Bass that Casady picked up in the ‘80s, but it was created to improve upon the design – to combine the electric tone with the feel and response of an acoustic and eclipse its Gibson counterpart.

Job done. That we have a new Casady bass released in 2024 is testimony to its success. The Jack Casady Fretless Bass has a 34" scale, a 3-point adjustable bridge, die-cast clover button tuners, an 41.5mm imitation bone nut, and ships in its own custom gig bag . It is out now, and it is priced £799. For more details, head over to Epiphone .