At long last, I got my hands on two New York Bass Works (NYBW) basses to review. I first heard of the company over a decade ago, back when the world’s best bass magazine came out once a month on paper. For reasons I don’t quite recall, the stars never aligned to see one alight at my office door, but I’ve long held a desire to spend some quality time with the instruments. Perhaps it’s my limitless fascination with Fender-Jazz-type basses, or the fact that any New York-based luthier enjoys some locational cachet due to the singular demands of the local clientele. Regardless, this review was a long time coming. The two basses here come from NYBW’s Reference Series line. Builder David Segal uses the name to connote the basses’ inspiration in his own collection of reference basses, namely early-’60s “pre-CBS” Fender Jazz Basses. As a player, Segal found a ton of work through the 1980s wielding these golden-era J basses, and he’s long been fascinated with investigating in detail what makes many of these highly sought-after instruments so successful sonically. While the NYBW instruments’ general aesthetic is clearly J-inspired, neither one is a clone of its ancestral DNA. Knowing that Fenders tend to neck-dive, Segal lengthened the upper horn to improve strap playability and shortened the lower horn to mirror that balance on the lap. To make the B string tauter, RS 5-strings like our tester utilize a 34.5" scale — as far as I’m concerned, a reasonable compromise between the standard length and the too-long-for-me 35" scale that some luthiers favor. The basses are also available with many more options than early-’60s Fender ever had, including fancy tops, numerous pickup and electronic packages, various finishes, and the numerous other de rigueur upgrades customers expect of modern high-end basses.RS5-22Like many builders modeling their work on Fender’s iconic formula, NYBW envisions Jazz Basses as fitting into two primary molds. There’s the ’60s-style alder-body/rosewood-fingerboard format, here embodied by the RS4-22, and the ash-body/maple-fingerboard recipe, as found in our RS5-22 tester. NYBW differentiates the ’70s-ish bass even further, sourcing larger frets than the 4, along with block inlays and a thicker poly-finished neck. My first impression of the RS5 was that per Segal’s design mission, the bass balanced exceptionally well — perfectly, actually. I believe that any energy dedicated to holding up the neck is energy not invested in actual playing, so this is a good thing. The bass was well built, too. It imparts a substantial, high-end vibe, and there’s abundant attention to detail to help justify its lofty price. The hardware is all top-shelf, mostly from Hipshot, and it has one of the most hardcore string trees I’ve ever seen, ensuring that the D and G strings have firm witness points at the nut. The RS5’s electronics are a hybrid of single-coil Aguilar J-style pickups and a new-to-me 3 Leaf Audi