The musician had explored, since the 1960s, many styles: blues, hard-rock, jazz-rock, electronic music or even pop. He died Tuesday, January 10, at the age of 78.
by Sylvain Siclier
He had explored, during a career started in the early 1960s, many styles, blues, jazz-rock, rock’n’roll, hard-rock, electronic music, pop pop , up to work with a symphonic set. Virtuoso guitarist, Briton Jeff Beck died on Tuesday January 10 at the age of 78. A press release from his family, released shortly before midnight on January 11, said the musician had “contracted bacterial meningitis”, who could not be treated. During a meeting, in 2001, Jeff Beck entrusted us, about his varied musical journey: “I have always looked forward, disc after disc, concert after concert, tour after tour.”
Its skillful use of some effects (distortion, Wah-Wah pedal, modification of the height of the sound with vibrato mechanics) and its dexterity in techniques to touch ropes by modulations, shift effects, often have been highlighted. Great talent technician, he will have developed a very lyricism in his game. If he played with several types of guitars, he was especially faithful to Fender’s Stratocaster, and had designed, at the end of the 1980s, a model that will bear his name, marketed in 1991 – several other Jeff Beck Signature Stratocaster will follow.
Born June 24, 1944 in Wallington, south of London, Jeff Beck first learned the piano, but it was the electric guitar that attracts it very early. The one he hears on the radio or on blues discs and then rock’n’roll. After vague art studies and a few odd jobs, he joined, in 1962, the training that accompanied the singer Screaming Lord Sutch, who presented himself on stage in a coffin and used accessories like skulls or knives, then participates in Several groups of rock and rhythm’n’blues before being invited, in March 1965, to replace Eric Clapton within The Yardbirds.
The group, led by the singer and harmonicist Keith Ref, is then best known for his covers of blues, and met a first success with the song for your love, more pop, when Clapton was one of them. Beck will remain in the group until the end of November 1966. From this period, we will remember Beck’s interventions on Shapes of Things, Over Under Sideways Down, Jeff’s Boogie and Happenings Ten Years Time AGO, where Jimmy Page also plays, which will soon Replace Beck.
A version of “superstition” recorded before that of Wonder
It was in January 1967 that the first Jeff Beck Group formed, with singer Rod Stewart, the guitarist (and bass player on occasion) Ron Wood and the keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Several bassists and drummers will join this base, which records two albums: Truth, published in July 1968 – on which we also find Beck’s Bolero, although recorded in May 1966, notably by Beck, page and Keith Moon, drummer of the Who And which will become one of the Beck classics during the concerts-, and Beck-Ola in June 1969. If the first album remained in the continuation of The Yardbirds, with Blues elements, Beck-Ola will have a harsher approach -Rock, the genre then being at its premises. Shortly after the release of Beck-Ola, Stewart and Wood left the group to train The Faces. In December, Jeff Beck has a serious car accident – he dedicates a passion to fast cars that will not leave him.
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