When Jeff Beck called Django Reinhardt the best guitarist of all time: “No question about that”
Make no mistake, Jeff Beck’s legacy as a guitarist is one that will undoubtedly last for several decades, nay, perhaps forever. Consistently found towards the top of the list when ranking the greatest guitarists of all time, the former Yardbirds member and prolific soloist has always been lauded for his innovations within the fields of blues rock, jazz fusion and hard rock, and the shockwaves that were initially felt within the world of music when he first arrived on the scene arguably changed how his successors approached playing the guitar.
However, Beck wasn’t the only one who innovated during this period. Prior to his emergence in the 1960s, there had been the blues and rock and roll explosions of the 1950s that saw the birth of the rock guitarist, and the works of BB King, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters paved the way for many of the greats of the following decade.
The subsequent expansion of rock music and the birth of multiple sub-genres in the ’60s allowed space for guitarists such as Beck to become part of the next generation of guitarists who would shape the sound of the decade. Artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, the latter two of whom also enjoyed stints in the Yardbirds, are all often cited as being among the greats of the following generation and were all innovators in their own right.
Quite often, you’ll see at least a couple of those sitting alongside Beck vying for a place on the podium as being one of the greatest guitarists of all time. However, all of the aforementioned legends were far from having been the first to innovate on their instrument, and one guitarist who is regularly overlooked in the greatest of all-time compendiums is the one that Beck himself cites as being the finest to have ever walked the earth.
Plying his trade from the 1930s until he died in the 1950s, the Belgian-born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was simply unlike any other guitarist that had come before him. Fusing together bebop and the Romani jazz he was raised on, his unique approach to the instrument was characterised by his fingerstyle playing and hard strumming for maximum attack and volume, and this is something that few guitarists were employing to the same effect at his time.
Due to having been involved in a fire that left him without the use of two of his fingers in his left hand, the limitations that Reinhardt was faced with were ultimately what caused him to be so innovative, discovering new ways in which to demonstrate his technical mastery with the use of only two fingers making contact with the fretboard. This obstacle may not have affected any other guitarists in their playing, but how Reinhardt was forced to look at things differently led many other guitarists who came after him to think about the ways in which they could alter their playing style in ways that would seem novel.
Beck was heavily influenced by and in awe of the Belgian’s playing style, and in a 1999 interview with Guitar Player, he enthused about how nobody could ever possibly touch him. “Django Reinhardt is still the best guitarist,” Beck told the magazine, “and there’s no question about that, ever.”
While fewer guitarists are still playing in the same way as Reinhardt in the modern era, his work was so unique at the time that there are entire generations of guitarists who will have looked up to him as their guitar deity, and the uniqueness of his playing at the time has to be commended for the role it played in shaping jazz and blues for subsequent generations.
