Tears for Jeff

I suppose it is age appropriate that every week, more of the people who defined the world in which I've lived are leaving. I've already had a few "days the music died": Ron Asheton, Lou Reed, Ornette, Cecil Taylor. (And that's just the ones who made it to maturity, but when Hendrix and Zappa checked out, I was too young to take it personally.) 

Nobody else has taken the expressive possibilities of the electric guitar as far as Jeff Beck did. He operated at the razor's edge of control and chaos, his mastery of nuance matched only by his fierce abandon. He was Sonny Rollins to Hendrix's Coltrane: one changed the world, the other lived long enough to fulfill his potential. And like Rollins, his stock in trade was interpretation, not material. (I thought of Sonny the other day while listening to a bootleg of the 1968 Jeff Beck Group -- I own several -- and hearing Jeff throw a quote from the "Colonel Bogey March" in the middle of a blues solo.) 

Jeff learned from Les Paul, Cliff Gallup, Buddy Guy, Roy Buchanan, and John McLaughlin, but was always resolutely his own guy. Once he abandoned blues-rock, he relied on keyboard players (Max Middleton, Jan Hammer, Tony Hymas, Jason Rebello) and drummers (Simon Phillips, Terry Bozzio) to write him tunes or cast arrangements of his riffs. (I was recently surprised to learn that Hymas played with Sam Rivers, and Bozzio wrote Jeff's signature solo piece "Where Were You.") He had a track record of employing strong female instrumentalists: Jennifer Batten, Tal Wilkenfeld, and Rhonda Smith, not to mention Carmen Vandenberg and Rosie Bones, his collaborators on the Loud Hailer record.

When I was 13, Jeff's solos with the Yardbirds were perfect little miniatures that I could study and try to copy. Truth was a bolt from the blue, and along with Live at Leeds and Funhouse, formed the core of my teenage aesthetic, such as it was. The "orange" album introduced hipper harmony and a more radical approach to melody. Like everyone else with ears in the early '70s, Jeff was obsessed with Stevie Wonder. He played on Talking Book, wrote the drum part to "Superstition," and was rewarded with "Cause We've Ended As Lovers," which blew my mind when it appeared on Blow By Blow and which I tried playing in Jeff's manner, without a pick, in the wake of his passing.

I saw Jeff twice on the Wired tour, backed by the Jan Hammer Group (which included a rhythm section that later worked with Lou Reed). The first time, at the Palace Theater in Albany, I was right up front and deafened for hours afterwards (sound reinforcement in the mid-'70s being pretty primitive, still). The second, from the balcony at the Palladium in NYC, I was amazed. I lost the thread after that, although I enjoyed the Guitar Shop album after seeing him on Arsenio Hall's late night TV show with Bozzio (whom I'd seen seven times with Zappa; later, Jeff had able drum support from another Zappa alum, Vinnie Colaiuta), and Frankie's House, the soundtrack to an Aussie miniseries about journos in Vietnam, done in collaboration with Jed Leiber, songwriter Jerry's son, where Jeff staked out the territory he'd explore for the rest of his career.

Jeff had stopped using a pick in 1980 and reports I heard through the '90s described him as a Zen master whose every note was tweaked. This was validated by the Ronnie Scott's DVD, which captured the Wilkenfeld-Colaiuta-Rebello lineup in an intimate setting, with lots of closeups of fingers on strings to geek out on. Emotion and Commotion was the logical conclusion of what George Martin had started with Blow By Blow, and Jeff's interpretation of Puccini's aria "Nessun dorma" is a fitting epitaph. His influence is everywhere, but we'll not see his like again.