Jeff Beck
Jeff

Originally conceived as an accompaniment tool, standing aside from well-established solo expressive instruments such as strings, brass, and piano, the electric guitar quickly managed to surpass them, albeit with the help of a partner: the amplifier.

The range of attack nuances, timbre, and sustain obtainable from one or more strings skillfully plucked and "worked" by the fingers, hands, brain, heart, belly, and guts of the performer is a bottomless pit, inspired and stimulated by what "returns" from the amplifier's speakers, after passing through that godsend represented by the valves, initially designed to provide sheer sound power, yet magically able to enrich it while distorting it.

The bulk of the innovation was driven, predictably, in the sixties, and Jeff Beck was there, on stage with the Yardbirds, blowing valves and tearing through speakers in search of something new, distant from the "dlin dlon" of pop and jazz, something powerful but controllable, something that could even scream like an industrial siren—but only when desired. The Yardbirds' companions could hardly tolerate him, as they wanted to be like the Beatles, with pretty songs and lots of girls; they had already endured the blues purist tantrums of his predecessor Eric Clapton and had no desire to experiment more. So Beck had to leave, making way for Jimmy Page.

Things turned out as they did, with Clapton and Page both entering the pantheon of legends, while Beck became the son of a lesser god, great indeed—a master, the best, but only for insiders or almost. Are there objective reasons for this? Beck isn't a great composer (neither is Clapton, nor Santana!), and Beck doesn't sing (but neither does Page, nor Van Halen!). So?

Let's say that Beck didn't (want to) sell himself, even though Rod Stewart was there, with whom he made two (historic) albums in the late sixties, and Mick Jagger wanted him in the Stones mid-seventies… imagine him putting up with playing those same three chords and the occasional solo while Mick flaunted around in front of him…

Jeff gave up the big circuit, opting to dive into jazz rock, instrumental stuff for refined tastes, music school records. Then, by the eighties, he tired of that too, making occasional guest appearances to embellish the solo albums of the aforementioned friends but politely declining to join them on tour. He made a timid attempt to get back into pop rock with an '85 album ("Flash") filled with various producers and singers, until he discovered techno, an ideal vehicle for someone who had truly played everything on the electric guitar; it was just a matter of exploding it into a thousand pieces, fragmenting it into colorful shards, surrounding it with loops, obsessive grooves, or sudden and changing drapery of computerized keyboards, always relying on a composer and sound alchemist (Tony Hymas, Jennifer Batten, a formidable guitarist who had midified herself to accompany him without interfering in his realm…)

"JEFF," his latest album released in 2003, is a techno album, unavoidable, and Jeff's intelligent rock blues guitar comfortably dabbles within it like a duck in water. It's incredible—he remains a "pentatonic" guitarist, profusely using slides and glissandos with his Stratocaster and blasting Marshall amps amidst an industrial heap of drums and basses, real or synthesized but sounding synthetic, vocal loops, synthesizers, or rather sounds controlled by a PC—a difficult task, but it works! Of course, if you like the genre, no problem; if not, it takes a small effort. We are not dealing with songs; this is music made of pieces and then reassembled into an unstable, sometimes obsessive patchwork, other times calmed into a peace of absolute lyricism and harmony—a PC montage of a thousand colorful facets where our hero operates with his infinite range of expressions.

Indeed, because Jeff Beck plays everything on the electric guitar; his hands bang the bridge, tremolo arm, headstock, the string remnants between the bridge and the tailpiece, and those between the nut and the headstock tuners, then the wah wah pedal, the slide thimble sliding across the strings using not just the left hand but sometimes the right, constantly using the volume and tone knobs and the pickup selector. Then there's the bending, vibrato of all kinds and speeds, with microtonal variations, quarter-tones sought and found with ridiculous ease and precision, the insane touch with the fingertips (Beck has abandoned the pick for ages). Entire melodies emerge from a single pluck, leaving the rest to the tremolo arm, a devilish piece of iron in precarious equilibrium with the bridge, yet he feels every damn millimeter of its placement.

A spectacle, for those who can vaguely grasp what he's doing and even for those who haven't the slightest idea but have good ears to taste his imperious tone (always!), the quick and surprising flashes, the musicality in inserting a devilish sixties blues phrase into a blasphemous world of machines and (intelligent) artifice. If you get bored with the listening, at least skip to the most linear and soft tracks 9. "JB's Blues", a chilling work of tremolo echo bouncing on a magical synthesizer chord progression, and then 12. "Bulgaria", a very romantic traditional piece played by an entire and real orchestra on which Beck, all in the high notes and "bringing in" the notes with the volume knob, weaves like silk threads on a red velvet cloth.

Jeff Beck doesn't make songs; he makes the electric guitar sing instead, if we agree that singing is the most direct and fulfilled form of expressing one's moods. To others, the grand structures, grand sound architectures, grand musical concepts, grand lyrical themes, but for him, at his absolute best, the Fender Stratocaster inside the Marshall amp, that ensemble of wood, steel, plastic, copper, and paint so akin and close to his heart.