NGD: mid 60s Jolana Hurricane - the Jazzmaster of the eastern bloc!

[Kinx]

Story time:
I have been looking for a Jolana Hurricane for some time, they are pretty rare and can be described as a solid body version of the popular Jolana Tornado guitar, but with proper offset styling. Perharps the closest attempt at a proper offset guitar made in the eastern bloc for a long time. I've seen the ad for this particular guitar a year ago on fb marketplace, messaged the seller like 15 minutes after the ad was published, but I was told I am already too late!

fast forward one year later: last friday, I did a gig with my band that doubled as my 36th birthday party and all of a sudden, in the middle of a set, the lights go on, happy birthday starts playing from the PA and I recieve this guitar as a gift on stage : turns out our bass player bought the guitar and then organized a fund raise amongst my friends to have it restored. Amazing.







check out the beautiful figuring on the neck! Very rare with Jolana guitars





This guitar is pretty incredible and also pretty rare. It features two separate circuits (like a jazzmaster or jaguar), three single coil pickups and pretty quirky tone controls. The switch on the upper horn switches between lead and rhythm circuits (each has it's own volume control), switches on the lower bout are as following (left to right): bass cut, treble cut, middle pickup on off, neck pickup on off. the bridge pickup is turned on only with the lead circuit and it bypasses the tone controls completely. I love the sound!

This particular guitar is from the earlier run made in Hradec Kralove, Czechoslovakia sometime between circa 1963 and 1965. It features gold plated hardware and ebony fretboard (later examples from the Krnov factory feature stained beech fretboard and nickel plated hardware). This particular instrument has been thoroughly restored by amazing luthier Ondrej Vlk from Wolf Guitars, it needed a new fretboard (the old one had cracks and had unrecoverable humps), reconstructed switches, new schaller roller bridge and new volume pots.

here's a quick demo I recorded (while experiencing an enormous hangover)

Youtube Demo

[Kinx]

I did another demo while waiting for a corporate zoom call, I think it sounds a bit better

Check it out here

[windmill]

Sounds good !

nice playing as well

Congratulations

[ThePearDream]

Cool guitar and great story! That neck looks nice and playable.

[Surfysonic]

Awesome story (and great friends!). Congrats! Sounds wonderful - really liked the song you were playing in the 2nd video, too!

[Embenny]

That's a cool guitar and an even cooler story. Congrats! What a fun birthday.

[shigginpit]

Great story and a great guitar, what wonderful friends and such a nice surprise, they had very good timing to present the gift and must have been quite a feeling to receive it in such a way! Congratulations on your new guitar.

By the way, the second demo sounds really good, is this a 25 inch (635mm) scale length? Or is it the full fender scale length? Looks a bit shorter perhaps. Also very interesting that it has the zero fret design like a mosrite.

[CivoLee]

I've always found Eastern Bloc guitars to be kind of cool and they can be found relatively cheap, but I'm afraid to actually get one; because who knows what corners were cut in proper grounding or material safety to achieve their monthly quota...

Happy NGD, anyway

[BoringPostcards]

Sweet. Sounds great.

[Zork]

Cool guitar and great playing. Do those early ones also have that screwdriver in the lower strapbutton? It's my favourite thing about Jolanas.

(Congratulations for having very cool friends!)

[letterstoboddah]

this reminds me of the old japan guitars. i played one once and it was very bad but maybe it had been not looked after. it was very dirty and the strings were super high from the frets good for slide guitar

[Steadyriot.]

Oh I missed this thread the first go around.
Congratulations! Those Jolana guitars are really cool and having such a story attached to it only makes it better.
Having been to Hradec Kralove I can also say it's built in a beautiful city.

[MayTheFuzzBeWithYou]

I think I‘ve either seen the pic here or somewhere on fb in the strange/weird/underdog (or whatever it is called) guitar group.
What a cool story!
Congrats on the guitar! And wow! How cool is it that you received it anyhow but serviced and all! This Bassist is a keeper!

[ohm-men]

Jolana made some nice guitars, they also produced the pre-Hagström Futurama's that were sold in the UK in the eary 60's.

I think these are nice vintage sleeper guitars that with a bit of luck can be still picked up for a great price...
Jolana had a rich history in producing instruments prior to starting out on electric guitars, hence their quality. They are on par with the west and east German made guitars from the same era. (Framus, Hopf, Höfner, etc...)

I also like their tone systems, instead of just going with a vol and tone pot + a cap, a lot of these guitars had switching systems that went beyond what a Jm or Jag has to offer. These can also be found on the Italian made guitars from this golden era (Eko, Meazzi, Crucianelli, etc...)
Since this was all pre-guitar effect pedals, their tonal shaping just made them a bit more versataile....

And when used with guitar Fx, they do amazing tones (- treble, -bass, - bass and treble, .... in combination with switching and blending the different pu's on the instrument...)

[Kinx]

Oh I missed this thread the first go around.
Congratulations! Those Jolana guitars are really cool and having such a story attached to it only makes it better.
Having been to Hradec Kralove I can also say it's built in a beautiful city.

Haha, it's actually my home town and right now I'm living just couple of blocks away from the OG factory site. There were three Jolana factories Hraddc Kralove with small volume output and where R&D was based until mid 70s, Krnov for mass production of solid bodies (early 60s to early 90s) and Horovice for hollowbodies (60s - late 70s) and subsequently splid bodies - legendary Rickenbacker clone called D Bass was made there in the late 80s, subsequently Kramer made their solidbodies there starting in 88 and later Epiphone and other brands.
The Hradec factory guitars are the most coveted ones, since they generaly tend to be of higher quality thanks to better QA and better tonewood selection (the factory was part of Petrof factory site, legendary piano brand with tons of fine tonewoods on site)