“The mastery”: The artist Jeff Beck said was unequalled
The blues can be a tight box to play inside. It’s a style steeped in tradition, passed down from work songs and hardship. With its well-worn 12-bar structures and standard chord progressions, it functions as a storytelling medium, a platform for expression. As a guitar player, Jeff Beck was as expressive as they come, a talent introduced to him from a young age, given that his mother was a pianist, and as a child, she played for him frequently.
Joining The Yardbirds in 1965, a band which also launched the careers of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, Beck would be instrumental in transforming the band’s sound. Connecting the dots between British R&B and psychedelia, his style of guitar playing was more experimental than that of his predecessors.
On tracks like ‘Heart Full of Soul’, Beck’s first single with the Yardbirds, he would utilise effects like fuzz and mimic a sitar sound, marking a significant shift for the band. On ‘Over Under Sideways Down’, of which Beck played guitar and bass, he ventured deeper into Eastern-influenced territory, playing the bouzouki for one of his most famous lines and moving away from the band’s original straight blues sound. Here, Beck became aware of the possibilities beyond the rigid structure of the 12-bar blues. The Yardbirds’ 1966 album, Roger the Engineer, would be the only Yardbirds album to feature Beck.
Through Eastern modes, Beck became aware of texture, phrasing, and structure, all central elements to jazz fusion. He would depart The Yardbirds after only 20 months, forming The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood in 1967. This would be at the same time Page would form Led Zeppelin following the dissolution of The Yardbirds.
“Everybody respects Jeff,” Page said. “He’s an extraordinary musician, and he’s developed a technique which is so complex, it’s just a beauty to behold and hear and to feel his playing. He’s having a conversation with you when he’s playing. It’s just he’s not singing”.
With bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice, he later formed Beck, Bogert & Appice in 1972. During the same decade, he explored jazz fusion, particularly through his albums Blow by Blow and Wired. Beck collaborated with keyboardist Jan Hammer, a key figure in the genre, known for bending notes on the keyboard like a guitar. Around this time, Beck also praised the playing of pioneering jazz fusion guitarist John McLaughlin, a contributor to several of Miles Davis’ electric jazz records.
“Things took a funny turn in the early 70s,” he said. “It all turned out well when I heard John McLaughlin, because his performance on the Miles Davis Jack Johnson album and with Mahavishnu Orchestra said, ‘Here’s where you can go’. And every musician I knew was raving about them. I thought, ‘This is a little bit of me, this. I’ll have some of that.’ The mastery of the playing, it was unequalled.”
The two would collaborate in 1975 while on a tour with McLaughlin’s band, Mahavishnu Orchestra. Beck would only continue to speak highly of his work for decades afterwards. In a 2010 interview with Uncut, Beck said, “John McLaughlin has given us so many different facets of the guitar and introduced thousands of us to world music, by blending Indian music with jazz and classical. I’d say he was the best guitarist alive.” Beck’s respect for McLaughlin’s multi-faceted guitar playing didn’t fade with time but deepened.
