I am very pleased to report that my Czech-Ease (and my new Shen 3/4 Willow, in Chinese flight case) made it home safely from Shanghai. The trip included a plane change in San Fransico, where all my stuff was off-loaded, cleared thru U.S. Customs, then placed on my connecting flight home to Los Angeles. That's a lot of handling and loading! I didn't have any real concerns about the Czech-Ease, but was really nervous about the Shen. This was my first time flying with a fully carved bass. To be safe, I removed the strings, bridge and tailpiece. I also dropped the sound-post. Maybe overkill, but better safe than sorry. I certainly would have hated to see my bridge put a hole thru my nice carved top! With the Czech-Ease, I decided to just lower the strings about a whole step, wrap a couple bungees around the case, in the event that one it's latches failed, and hope for the best. The bass presented itself on the baggage belt at LA to me in perfect condition. What a sight to see my babies coming down the oversized baggage moving belt in LA, my pulse racing as I snatched them off the belt, what blissful relief to find that they both survived to long trip undamaged! FYI, my excess baggage fees for the flight came to about $220 U.S. This was for two checked suitcases and the two checked basses. Six months ago, when I first flew to Shanghai, there were no additional charges, I only came with one suitcase and the Czech-Ease, which kept me within the typical two bag limit for international flights.
As to the idea of a fully carved Czech-Ease model, at first this sounded like something I might be interested in. But my experience has proved that having a small, but great sounding plywood bass on the road with me makes at lot more sense. Here's why. #1, less worry when flying, basses are more often than not treated as common baggage by the handlers, they are thrown around, dropped, ride on moving belts and can suffer God knows what other kinds of abuse by the airlines. #2, my bass went on many, many taxi rides, it fits just fine across the backseats with it's removable headstock scroll. Nevertheless, a lot of bumping can happen while loading and unloading, I'd cringe everytime the bass took even a small shot, but would have had much more to worry about if it was a more fragile carved bass. Many of the doorways in Chinese buildings are a bit narrower than I'm used to seeing in America, sometimes the bass would take little shots while trying to negotiate these. #3, weather, it rains all the time in Shanghai. Hot and humid in the summertime and cold and dry in the winter. Not the greatest conditions for carved basses. If one travels a lot there can be huge extreams in weather conditions, so plywoods make sense for this. #4, the stuff you can't control. For example, the sax player standing next to you on the bandstand, who when he drinks becomes careless about where his feet might go, I'd allways have to make sure I was the first on stage and the last to leave with him around. There allways seems to be one or two guys like that in every band! I feel better about playing on tight stages with a plywood bass. #5, the Czech-Ease, even though it's plywood sounds pretty darn good! Often other bass players would come by my gig and sit in. The Czech-Ease sounds like any good plywood bass when amplified. A good deep and punchy thump with the Realist, I would sometimes use an Underwood or Stat-B too, the bass sounds fine with either of these pickups. I can't imagine it falling short in any sort of application where an amp and pickup is nessasary.
While there is nothing that compares to playing a good carved bass, (yes, I did use my Shen much of the time on the gig), the Czech-Ease proved itself to be a very useful bass. I played it every night for the first six weeks of the gig before buying the carved Shen. Even after I got the Shen bass I would bring the Czech-Ease to the gig some nights instead. It's different for sure, but in it's own way is a great little bass!
Incidently, one afternoon before a rehearsal I had set the Czech-Ease down on it's ribs on the dance floor in front of the bandstand. (so Chinese, to include a dancefloor in a venue that features jazz!) My back was turned for several minutes while I was futzing with my amp. I turned around to see the long suffering cleaning woman mopping away, compleatly oblivious to the fact that she had one of my tuning peg handles entangled in the long strands of her mop and that my bass was doing figure eights, sliding and spinning on it's ribs across the slick and by now, very shiny surface of the dancefloor! Thank God, there was no damage at all to my bass. Not even a scratch! Very glad I didn't bring my Shen that day!
