Bolero guitarist – Newspaper Kommersant No. 5 (7450) dated 01/13/2023

One of the most respected and recognizable guitarists in rock history, Jeff Beck, has died at the age of 78 after being hospitalized with bacterial meningitis.

In the social networks of any rock musician around the world, you can now find words of grief for Jeff Beck. Everyone from Ritchie Blackmore to David Gilmour and from Jimmy Page to Joe Bonamassa has something to say about him. But the obituaries barely mention the songs, nothing like “his ‘Imagine’ is played all over the world” or “Ziggy Stardust became my role model”. Jeff Beck became a classic thanks to his participation in the classic English blues-rock band The Yardbirds and the unique sound of the guitar.

At the age of 10, Jeff Beck began to sing in the church choir and, before getting carried away with the guitar, he mastered drums, piano and cello. Like many British rock legends, after school he went to study fine art – at Wimbledon College of Art. And already there he became interested in blues and rock.

Many of our readers were born when he was already in the status of a legend. Beat Instrumental magazine recognized him as the best solo guitarist back in 1966. It was in the composition with Jeff Beck that The Yardbirds recorded their hits that entered the charts. Of the three guitarists who played in The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck is the least known in Russia. Jimmy Page took advantage of The Yardbirds in Led Zeppelin. Eric Clapton played in Cream and later achieved huge popularity as a solo artist. Of this trio, only Jeff Beck consistently moved along the path of an implacable experimenter, for whom there was nothing worse than stopping at a certain stage.

In The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck got to replace Eric Clapton on the recommendation of Jimmy Page. Beck played with this line-up for 20 months and recorded with the group the album “Roger the Engineer” (1966) and the short play “Beck`s Bolero”, based on Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero”. On this recording, which became Beck’s de facto first solo single, Jimmy Page was the second guitarist, another future Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, played bass, pianist Nicky Hopkins sat at the piano, and Keith Moon, drummer, played drums. The Who. Critics wrote of the composition’s “epic scope” and characterized it as rhythmically ambitious and filled with primal energy.

The same period in the history of The Yardbirds is captured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up. The audience of a small club listens to the group without moving, as if under hypnosis. Almost nobody dances. Magic is happening on stage – rock moves from the category of dance music to serious art. The band plays their version of Tiny Bradshaw’s “The Train Kept A-Rollin`” blues in the film, and Jeff Beck smashes the guitar amp and his instrument. The guitar he threw off the stage is taken with him by the main character, played by David Hemmings. Today, this fragment of the film looks like a historical document, carved in stone, almost like rock art, left to us as a legacy from “swinging London”.

Jeff Beck has always been primarily interested in the guitar, and all eight of his Grammy – and twice as many nominations – received for instrumental recordings.

However, in his The Jeff Beck Group, organized in 1967, there was a vocalist – Rod Stewart. In the early 1970s, like most of his comrades, Jeff Beck played hard rock and blues rock. Jeff Beck demonstrated the breadth of his musical horizons on his second solo disc “Blow By Blow” (1975), which was produced by the “fifth Beatle” George Martin. On this album, Jeff Beck played funk, jazz and rock, armed with melodies from The Beatles and Stevie Wonder, among other things.

In the late 1970s, Jeff Beck played jazz, and in the early 1980s, fusion. In 2000, the experimental disc “You Had It Coming” appeared, invented together with Michael Jackson’s guitarist Jennifer Batten, singer Imogen Heap and electronics artist Nitin Sauny. In 2003, Beck released the semi-electronic album Jeff. Experimental guitar albums are not a top seller. Since the mid-1960s, fellow guitarists have paid every respect to Beck, but Jeff Beck achieved serious commercial success as a solo artist only in 2010 with the album “Emotion & Commotion”, recorded with a symphony orchestra. This record of his was the highest in the UK charts since the mid-1960s. On “Emotion & Commotion”, for the first time in a long time, Jeff Beck applied his talent to simple and famous melodies, including the standards “Over The Rainbow” and “I Put A Spell On You”, as well as the classics of Puccini and Britten. In the key number “Emotion & Commotion” – the aria “Nessun Dorma” from the opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini – the electric guitar replaces the voice of the tenor.

With this album, Jeff Beck came to Russia. During the concert, the hero of the evening, without much fuss, demonstrated how much the modern school of playing the electric guitar owes him. Jeff Beck played without a plectrum, only with his fingers, as a last resort using a blues accessory called a “bottleneck”, “bottleneck”. Jeff Beck abandoned picks when he came up with the idea of ​​using the country style of playing in rock. In each piece, Jeff Beck demonstrated several playing techniques and several sounds. He played the entire concert on a white Fender Stratocaster, changing it only twice.

Since Emotion & Commotion, Jeff Beck has only released one solo album, Loud Hailer (2016). However, his name was constantly featured in the music news. In 2022 alone, Jeff Beck managed to travel with concerts in the company of Johnny Depp with their joint album “18” and appear on the new disc of Ozzy Osbourne in the title track “Patient Number 9”. The Black Sabbath veteran has been nominated for a Grammy for this album, and at the awards ceremony on February 5, his comrade will certainly be given credit.

Despite his passion for experimentation, Jeff Beck has gone down in history as a rock encyclopedia virtuoso instrumentalist who created the modern rock sound in the 1960s, along with George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. In 2010, in an interview with Kommersant, Jeff Beck named Django Reinhardt and Les Paul as his teachers. And among the many definitions of the characteristic style of the game of Jeff Beck himself, I would like to single out one – “inner light”.

Boris Barabanov