The Guitarist’s Guitarist
Jeff Beck’s Groundbreaking Virtuosity Changed the Course of Rock Guitar
The world lost one of its truly great guitarists this week, when Jeff Beck succumbed to bacterial meningitis. During his time, he gave us a nearly six-decade body of work as eclectic, innovative and inspiring as anyone in rock. Often described as a “guitarist’s guitarist,” Beck boldly blazed down musical paths where others feared to tread. His killer tone, harmonic flurries, manipulation of his guitar’s volume knob and divebombing whammy bar swoops gave him a singular style that was instantly identifiable, and his restlessness in pursuing different sounds insured that he would continue to innovate at an age where most everyone else was content to rest on their laurels.
Alan Williams, a music professor at University of Massachusetts/Lowell, summed up Beck as follows: “Jeff Beck was one of rock’s first stardom renunciants, stepping off the glory/gravy train every time it pulled into the success station. He was an iconoclast, a determined individualist not to be contained or defined by genre. He was too weird for blues purism, too angular for pop, bored with the template he created with both the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group that Jimmy Page would soon build into Led Zeppelin. He courted jazz fusion but eschewed the mathematical mysticism of the Mahavishnu…
