Canteloupe Island is a Herbie Hancock composition, if memory serves. As a piece of music, it’s little more than an excuse to solo. A groove. These fellows in the video take full advantage of its possibilities. I’ve never heard of any of those guys, but that’s OK. They might not have heard of me, either. I don’t care about any of that, exactly. Let’s talk about what’s important. What the hell are they doing playing Fender Telecasters? Jazz players don’t play Telecasters. Well, they didn’t.

If you’re only partially aware of guitar brands and models, I’ll try to explain it a little in my haphazard and simple-minded way. There are only two kinds of electric guitars: Fenders and Gibsons. They’re the Fords and Chevys of the musical world. Other brands can usually be slotted somewhere in the shade that one or the other of these two manufacturers throws. Musical guys generally become devotees of one or the other, and have a tendency to stick with them. (Fender) Stratocasters or (Gibson)Les Pauls was always the big bifurcation in rock music, for instance.

Before there were Stratocasters, there were Telecasters, the guitars you see in the video. In a way, before every kind of solid body electric guitar, there were Telecasters. Other people tried to make solid body guitars with pickups for amplification before Teles, but they were experiments, one-offs, or failures on the fiscal front. Leo Fender and his friends designed, built, and most importantly, sold Telecasters, and they became the Ur-guitar. Everything else was a riff off of them.

Before all this, guitars were made like violins and other similar stringed instruments. They were hollow, often with a carved (arch) top, with a neck that was permanently affixed to the body. They were acoustic. There was an arms race to make them louder for a long while, even though they were acoustic. If you’ve ever played the sort of guitar you see Django Reinhardt play, you’d know those things are comparatively loud, and the treble they produce cuts through the noise of a whole band. But no matter how big and boomy the box got, it couldn’t compete with amplified instruments.

So dudes started sticking electronic pickups in various configurations into arch top (Spanish) guitars, and plugging them into amplifiers. Gibson started making them like that right from the factory, and had a hit with the ES-150 and similar models. The first true electric guitar soloist, Charlie Christian, popularized them.

There is a problem with these guitars: feedback. Some of the noise you’re making bounces around inside them, and comes out a little later. That can lead to the various screeches and shrieks and whistles and hums you hear from public address systems used to make most bands louder and even less appealing. It also made the tone sort of fuzzy, sometimes in a nice, warm way. Other times it was just fuzzy. For example, my brother played a Gibson ES 330 back in the day.  It was popular with blues bands and jazz kids and Chuck Berry sorta dudes. The guitar’s tendency to feed back was legendary, though, and forced him to stuff hand towels in the F-holes to shut it up when gigging.

There had to be a better way. Guys wanted to play at bigger volumes in larger bands and needed something simpler and more robust to carry around. The Telecaster was it.

The Telecaster is a barbarous guitar, and I mean that in a good way. Compared to fussy arch top electrified jazz guitars, it’s a boat oar. Leo Fender basically changed everything about building a guitar with this design. Why not cut the body out of a solid block of wood instead of gluing up a bunch of fiddly bits? Why not just bolt (screw, really) the neck onto the body? Why can’t we just rout channels out of the front of the guitar and run all the wires the easy way, instead of fishing around through the F-holes or the back of the guitar to do it? Just cover the whole mess with a huge plastic pick guard and be done with it. Why glue a fancy expensive piece of wood on top of the neck and then cut fret slots in it when you can cut fret slots right in the one-piece neck? Why glue little wings on the neck head to spread the tuning pegs out when you can line them up in a row on the one-piece neck? Why not screw the pickup right to the tailpiece and make it an assembly that can be screwed to the guitar in one shot? Later on, we can add a second pickup just below the neck and get a less trebly tone, with a switch to go back and forth between pickups, or turn them both on.

All electric guitars are based on the Telecaster, when you get right down to it. It was eventually superseded by the Stratocaster in popularity (you can take a video tour of the factory making Strats in 1959 here), but they still make Telecasters, and they’re still quite popular. But not for jazz. Well, as far as I know. Er, knew.

The video above isn’t where I noticed the phenomenon of jazz players using Telecasters. I’m way down Mexico way, and I’ve already seen two jazz combos with the guitarists playing Telecasters. I was fuddled. Befuddled, even. The Telecaster was designed and marketed to be an improvement for steel guitar, Western Swing, Country, Rockabilly, and any sort of honky-tonk musician who needed a leg up on his loud bandmates. Jazz? Not so much. All of a sudden everyone is playing sus9 chords and soloing with diatonic triads and whatnot, using Teles. What gives?

Well, it is a good, solid (literally and figuratively) guitar. Durable, relatively inexpensive, and versatile. A few guys did use them for jazz way back when, although they usually pried out the neck pickup and routed out a bigger hole for a Les Paul style humbucking pickup. Like Ed Bickert did:

I’ve owned an old Telecaster, and if you select the neck pickup, roll the tone knob way over, and pick it right, the humbuckers are strictly optional for jazz. The folks I’ve seen lately are using their Teles straight out of the box that way.

I chalk the whole thing up to a contrarian mode. Young people want to make trends of their own, whether they make much sense or not. People get tattoos because they know their mothers will think they’re ugly. Well, they think their mothers will think that, but mom has ass antlers, so they have to tattoo their face to get a rise out of her. Everyone staples their house on the ass end of their garage, because otherwise they’d be just like Ozzie and Harriet, man.

The Telecaster is still fairly inexpensive for what you get, and it works fine, even for jazz. Like a snake eating its social media tail, maybe everyone’s playing jazz on a Telecaster because no one is, so everyone is doing it, man. Or maybe I’m in Mexico, and there’s a Fender factory in Mexico, so there’s no eyewatering tariff and import paperwork on one down here, like there is for a Les Paul or a Gibson L5, so they make a luxury out of necessity. Whatever it is, don’t blame me, I’m just the bass player.

And by the way, that bass player has 5 strings on his bass, so he’s forgotten what his job is.