I gotta tell ya, that you’d sort of listen to Jeff along the way and you’d go “wow, he’s gettin’ really, really good, Jeff” and you’d hear him a few years later and he’d keep gettin’ better and better and better. And he still has, all the way through. You know, he leaves us mere mortals, believe me, you know, just wondering and having so much respect for him.—Jimmy Page inducting Jeff Beck into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 2009

I always keep a guitar in nearly every place in the house to remind me that I should be doing that. And ah, the guitar is always a constant challenge. Every time I pick it up I pretend that I’ve just started playing—and it seems to work.—Jeff Beck, Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story

There’s a Zen parable about two carpenters who ply their trade over the same 20 years. One carpenter continues to learn new skills, honing his craft year after year. The  other learns enough in a year to get by then never progresses. One man is a carpenter of 20 years—a master, the other a carpenter for one year twenty times in a row.

Jeff Beck was that rarest man, a master and a maverick, an artist relentless in his desire to improve, push, innovate, and attain greater fluency in order to express his art ever more fully.

I “discovered” Jeff Beck in 8th grade when I heard “Star Cycle” and “El Becko” on the radio. It was 1980 and Jeff had a new album: There and Back. I made it my mission to get that LP (I’m on my second copy.) I didn’t realize that I’d already heard and loved Jeff Beck as a member of The Yardbirds; “Heart Full of
Soul,” “Shapes of Things,” and “Over, Under, Sideways, Down” all owe their chart-topping chops to Jeff’s groundbreaking guitar genius.

If guitar is a language, then every guitarist plays in his or her dialect. My precocious epiphany was that I understood every nuance of Jeff’s dialect, every phrase of his patois. Soon I was absorbed in what he had to tell me on Flash, Wired, and Blow by Blow. In 1995 I saw Jeff Beck at the Garden State Arts Center where I got to hear him play “Star Cycle” along with his canonical mainstays “Freeway Jam,” “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” and “People Get Ready.”

The hands of Jeff Beck

As well as hearing how his technique improved, you can literally see how Jeff Beck’s approach evolved. Compare the way he manipulates his guitar in 1974 when he plays “She’s a Woman” on a BBCFOUR session (it’s the 1954 “oxblood” Gibson Les Paul, the same ax he wields on the cover of Blow by Blow) to where he’s at on March 22, 1999 performing “What Mama Said” on Late Night with David Letterman.

In a YouTube video called “Why JEFF BECK is UNCOPYABLE,” Rick Beato, the amiable musician, producer, and music educator, says: “When you talk about the sound of the guitar being in the hands, his sound is completely in his hands.”

Fellow Yardbirds and longtime friends Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page concur, both linking the hands to the dialect. Clapton said in an interview: “I don’t even know how he’s doing it half the time—he’s combining the tremolo arm with bending and with volume. There’s so much going on between his left hand and his right hand and what the right hand is doing—all the independence it has. It’s all about making that voice.” Page put it this way: “He’s developed a technique which is so complex—it’s just a beauty to behold and to hear and to feel his playing. He’s having a conversation with you when he’s playing, it’s just that he’s not singing.”

For the apotheosis performance where you can both hear and see the evolution of his technique, you must watch Performing This Week: Live at Ronnie Scott’s (there’s a film as well as an album). Jeff played five nights in 2007 at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, an intimate venue that seats 250 lucky souls. I bought the DVD a few months ago; whoever decided to film and lovingly record the show deserves a Nobel Prize.

For these gigs, Beck’s band of ringers consisted of Vinnie Colaiuta on drums; Jason Rebello on keyboards and synthesizers; and a 22 year-old phenom on bass named Tal Wilkenfeld. To listen to this album is to have one’s ears ravished, but to watch this performance is to behold a master. Jeff is 63: he’s been playing guitar—and getting better and better at it—for roughly 50 years.

And there’s a real sense of occasion. No doubt deliberately seated at a table out of the spotlight are Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Appearing later on stage to accompany Jeff is Eric Clapton. Think of those three guitarists in one cozy club, the Holy Trinity sprung from “the Surrey Delta” and nurtured in that six-string incubator known as The Yardbirds. Brian May of Queen, who grew up in the same area of England, can be also seen enjoying the show.

Every song constitutes a highlight. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t watch or at least listen to these live versions of “Beck’s Bolero,” “Angel (Footsteps),” or “Nadia.” Four songs into the set, “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” provides the first showstopper. Stevie Wonder’s achingly mournful song always allowed Jeff to use his entire sonic palette, but this performance crackles with an additional dynamic: Jeff gives the first solo to the kid. He even slings his Stratocaster behind his back and clasps his hands
together, as much to say “the stage is yours” as to admire Tal’s skills. She plays like the second coming of Jaco Pastorius and as she lays down phrase after astonishing phrase, Beck throws his arms in the air and looks to the heavens in a delightfully paternal effusion of joy and esteem.

A second showstopper, Jeff’s rendition of “A Day in the Life” earned him a Grammy for Best Instrumental Rock performance. But before the Grammy came Jimmy Page’s ecstatic applause and beatific smile as the camera briefly shows him overcome with admiration. And then there’s the encore with Clapton who joins Jeff and the band for a Chess Records A and B-side of Muddy Waters: “Little Brown Bird” and “You Need Love,” the latter the basis for Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (wish Jimmy had stepped up to help out on that one!)

When Jeff and his bandmates take their bows, the audience rises in thunderous, heartfelt ovation. What an outpouring of love for this man! You can tell that everyone there realized that they’d experienced something rare and exquisite and beautiful.

One of one

For my money, Jeff Beck is the greatest Rock guitarist of them all. His toolbox held everything—he could use distortion and feedback as well as Page or Hendrix; riddle you with hammer-ons a la Eddie Van Halen; and modulate that whammy bar as if it was part of his right hand, enabling him to create sounds like a pedal steel . . . or a crying baby or a menacing howl or an ethereal spirit singing in deep space.

We never got to see where Jimi Hendrix might have taken his art; like a butterfly in amber, Jimi’s genius remains preserved at 27. Like a lot of guitarists at the time, when Jeff heard (and saw) Jimi he thought of simply packing it in, as in “damn, what’s the point?” But Jeff kept playing and, more importantly, kept improving—from the sitar-like riff on “Heart Full of Soul” to his astonishing replication of Hindi singing on “Nadia,” from “Beck’s Bolero” to “El Becko,” from “Freeway Jam” to “Roy’s Toy.”

Jeff Beck racked up eight Grammy Awards. He played so nice they put him in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice—as a Yardbird in 1992 then as a solo artist in 2009. His collaborations read like a Who’s Who of Rock, Soul, Pop, and Jazz Fusion: Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Nicky Hopkins, Stevie Wonder, George Martin, Max Middleton, Donovan, Stanley
Clarke, Jon Bon Jovi (that’s Jeff shredding the solo on “Blaze of Glory”), Jan Hammer, and Sting, as well as many of tomorrow’s legends, such as singers Imogen Heap and Joss Stone, guitarist Jennifer Batten, and bassists Rhonda Smith and Tal Wilkenfeld.

He was called “the guitarist’s guitarist.” After his death, a new title appeared: one of one. As with all great artists, though, Beck’s technical skills served higher artistic ambitions: Jeff always had the finest musical ideas. Rick Beato astutely points out: “One thing is that he plays the most unique phrases of anyone I can think of.” Precisely!

I have a simple measure for his greatness: if I could be miraculously given the ability to play guitar like anyone, my first choice would be Jeff Beck. No question.

Jeff’s death haunts me. We lost this amazing human being on January 10, 2023. My eyes frequently moisten watching him play at any point in his career but most poignantly in that bravura in excelsis at Ronnie Scott’s. It breaks my heart that Jeff died of bacterial meningitis. The other two “Surrey Delta” prodigies with whom he grew up—Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page—tempted death with substance abuse, particularly heroin addiction, while Beck took pretty good care of himself and had notably steered clear of the heavy drugs which ravaged the ranks of his peers.

But there’s a deeper reason why I’ve taken his passing much harder than other Rock titans: for 43 years, Jeff Beck talked to
me. I understood what he was saying so well that I felt I knew him; it was merely incidental that we’d never actually met.

At Beck’s funeral, Jimmy Page eulogized his longtime friend, sometime collaborator, and, in the best way, rival guitarist by calling him “the quiet chief.” Jeff tended to be soft-spoken, though he had a refreshingly irreverent sense of humor. Jeff Beck did his real speaking through his guitar. You listen to his music, you watch him play, and you realize that Jeff Beck was a beautiful human being, a supreme artist. He was The Master.