“Quite superhuman”: The guitarist Jeff Beck thought was out of everybody’s league
A time machine is something all great music fans would love to own – but where it would take you was an entirely different question. While every great decade has its reasons, it’s often hard to look past the decade that birthed counterculture as a concept: the 1960s.
A swift return to the decade of free love and you’ll be inundated with classical artistic moments to make the turbulent trip back half a century worth doing. There is, of course, the general dominance of The Beatles, which fuelled a pop culture movement that intersected with the hippie community, which would have eventually opened you up to opportunities to watch someone like Jimi Hendrix, which would have then led you to the counterculture mecca: Woodstock.
All of these events alone are worth the trip back in time, especially if you were a music fan whose passion centred around the humble guitar. In many ways, it was the instrument of the time – both acoustic and electric, and became the cornerstone of musical innovation. While many musicians, all over the globe, contributed to this, one of the most exciting cultural microcosms existed right here in Great Britain, in London’s dingy late-night clubs.
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page all descended onto these venues to spark a blues scene that has rightly been regarded as one of the most pivotal musical moments in history. And joining those three guitarists at the very cream of the crop was Jeff Beck.
His signature fingerstyle technique, paired with a vocal-like phrasing approach to laying down guitar lines, made him one of the premier guitar heroes of the ‘60s, and would thus be stop number one on my whistle stop time machine tour of the era. But should my power warrant me a chance to chat with Beck backstage and understand his genius, I would have swiftly realised that I should have dialled the destination twenty years earlier.
Because when Beck named the one guitarist he considered the very best, it was someone who preceded him and all his glamorous mates of the ‘60s. He claimed, “By far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt,” adding that he “was quite superhuman. There’s nothing normal about him, as a person or a player.”
He continued, “His electric playing in the ‘40s is just humiliating. His lead lick–whew! I slow them down, and I still can’t grasp what he’s doing. Recently, I acquired some rare scratchy black-and-white film of Django playing. It’s the most glorious, but tantalizing short footage, but he is playing like crazy. I’ve been studying it in slow motion, and all you can see are these two grubby fingers going like lightning up and down the fretboard.”
Damn, maybe I got it all wrong and headed to the entirely wrong decade in my time-travelling pursuit of musical genius. Who can blame me, though? The ‘40s is perhaps one of the most overlooked musical eras, despite as Beck points out, it propped up the creativity of so much brilliant music we enjoyed in the ‘60s.
Because while the ‘60s were undoubtedly brilliant, there was simply nobody playing like Reinhardt. His virtuosic approach to guitar playing effectively invented a genre in “gypsy jazz” or “jazz manouche”, and he did that all without two functioning fingers on his left hand. He was simply an unparalleled genius.
