He began as a guitar player, the lead guitarist actually, for the Washington, D.C. Rhythm and Blues band The Triumphs by the time he was 15. The rhythm guitarist was a friend of his, another aspiring local musician a couple of years older, a kid named Jorma Kaukonen.

Jack on guitar in 1958, courtesy of http://www.jackcasady.com

John William JACK Casady was born 80 years ago today. Jorma liked Jack’s record collection of Blues and R ‘n B, and they began messing around, just playing songs they both knew. They started a garage band, The Triumphs, in 1959, lasting until Jorma graduated high school and left for Antioch in 1960. Jack remained in D.C., underage gigging in nightclubs, courtesy of a fake ID he’d created using a copy machine owned by Jorma’s Grandfather. He was 16, playing in cover bands, working steadily. He had a call one night to fill in on bass for a gig, which he accepted despite not being a bassist. The gig changed his life. I’ll let him explain, taken from his bio page at https://www.jackcasady.com/:

“As soon as I started playing bass my work quota expanded tremendously. And I started falling in love with the instrument. There was just a certain sound, that register of the bass and also the higher register of the bass which is kind of going into the cello range that I really was attracted to.”

For 65 years and counting, he has been a tireless innovator, tapping into a bottomless well of improvisatory musical creativity. For Jack Casady, it is four things: The Melody. The Groove. The Swing. The Tone. Achieving the tone has been the guiding point throughout:

“Tone is your signature as to who you are… The music builds around the tone. It isn’t just a series of notes or the articulation or the technique. The signature sound of a great musician is his tone and that sets him apart from others.”

Four instruments in particular have delivered that tone, though really, it sounds like he has always achieved it. In the first years of Jefferson Airplane, Jack relied on his classic Guild Starfire. In ’68, for $4,000, he purchased an Alembic bass, the first ever manufactured by the company, Serial No. 001. The recorded and live bass sound Jack achieved with the Alembic was thunderous, unheard before then. It freed Jack up to expand his playing style, usually showcased in his solos during “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” in the Airplane sets.

Jack’s acoustic playing is sublime, and his acoustic tone is second to none. During COVID, Jack made several appearances on Jorma’s Quarantine Concert livestreams. Those shows were a life saver. In a couple of the performances, Jack played his Balalaika, acquired in 1967 with the High G string and pickup added. The sound is incredible. During Quarantine Concert #12, Jack told the story of acquiring the bass before he and Jorma played “Third Week at the Chelsea.” You may need to crank the volume; Jack is speaking softly and is a little off-mic:

I love the story of Jack’s custom Diana bass, created out of grief, in tribute to his wife Diana. It’s a wild looking instrument with intricate internal electronics and a condenser mic at the air hole on top. I was going to write up the story of its creation as best I could, but I found a clip of Jack talking about it, far more eloquently than I ever could:

There is one other bass of Jack’s that I’m partial to, the Epiphone Jack Casady model he designed a few years back. It’s a knockout, visually and sonically. He described it himself in a Vintage Guitar interview:

“A semi-hollowbody bass is my thing. That sweet tone is what I’m after – that open tone that’s articulate, that you can reach down inside the note and hear all the harmonics. I went back to trying to get some of the stand-up bass sound out of an f-hole bass, while still getting the articulation and the power you get out of a solidbody. So the Epiphone Jack Casady model is a full 34” scale, and I wanted one really good, absolute top-quality, low-impedance pickup, placed at the sweet spot of the length of the strings, so all the harmonics line up.“

Jack escalates things about 4:00 in…

I gave one as a gift to a musician I know when he graduated from college a couple of years back:

Today’s Playlist is a SomethingIsHappening compendium celebrating the great Jack Casady’s 80th Birthday:

#JackCasady #HotTuna #Washington #Bass #Balalaika #JormaKaukonen #Epiphone #Alembic #JeffersonAirplane #JeffersonStarship