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| Joe Beck : Get Me Whaling City Sound WCS 058 |
Coming of age in the sixties, guitarist Joe Beck was a
ubiquitous presence embedded in much of the music that I was listening to at
the time. Beck started his career in the early sixties at the
age of seventeen in Manhattan playing with some of the most heralded stars in
the jazz world. He always said “I was just in the right place at the right
time,” but truth be told he was damn good. You had to have been good to have
played with the likes of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, Gil Evans, Maynard
Ferguson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Buddy Rich. Perhaps, most
famously, he was the first electric guitarist to play and record with Miles Davis.
He remembered the gig with Davis in 1967: “For years I had dreamed of playing
with Miles, one of my heroes. But when I had the chance I wasn’t prepared yet,
and I played very badly on that session.” The guitarist escaped the music for three
years, operating a dairy farm before returning to become a staple of the studio
and session scene in New York.
Beck’s imprint was all over Creed Taylor’s famous CTI label
from the early seventies. He was practically Taylor’s house guitarist, his
work on sessions by Esther Phillips, Joe Farrell, J.J. Johnson, Paul Desmond,
Hubert Laws and Idris Muhammed. He made his own fusion release,
self-titled Beck, from 1975 that included keyboardist Don Grolnick and the
breakout crossover star, alto saxophonist David Sanborn. Beck was a jazz player who could scream like a
rock player but with chops, and he employed ample fuzz tone or wah-wah effects
as required. The guitarist was in the studio constantly, playing sessions for
others, writing jingles and eventually producing and arranging. In 1975, his studio work could be found on
Paul Simon’s blockbuster Still Crazy After All These Years.
Not all his work was memorable. In 1977 he was enlisted to produce/arrange
Frank Sinatra’s disastrous plunge into disco on two singles "Night and Day" and "All or Nothing At All".
Despite being an
in-demand sessions player, Joe looked back at time as being creatively stifling. In an interview in thelastmiles.com he summed up his experience this way. "I was totally involved in the studio business in New York, which is basically playing bad music for good money. That's what recording musicians do. Every once in a while they do something of note and that's nice. I was moving from one house to another and my appointment book fell out of a drawer.I picked it up and noticed on one page that I had twenty-one sessions in five days. Now there are not twenty-one good sessions a week on the planet, so you know eighteen of them were absolute horror shows. Studio life is lucrative but musically bare."
By 1989 Beck returned to dairy farming, an ill-fated investment that depleted most of his savings
and by 1992 he returned to music at age 47, a little too old for the studio
scene. He picked up his guitar and returned to playing what he called “real”
music, touring Europe. In 1993, he was still on call and can be heard on James
Brown’s “Funky Side of Town” from Brown’s Get On The Good Foot album. Sometime in the late nineties, after he and
the guitarist John Abercrombie had finished a successful European tour, Joe
Beck was diagnosed with lung cancer. Despite a positive attitude and extensive
treatment Beck passed on July 22, 2008 in Woodbury, CT at the age of sixty-two.
And so, almost six years after his untimely passing, we get the release of a new trio album
recorded live at Anna’ Jazz Island in Berkley, California on September 14, 2006.
Posthumously released albums are a hit or miss affair. We often give performers,
especially one’s we are fond of, a pass when we listen to something that we
know is their final work, especially if they performed in failing health. On Joe Beck’s final release, Get
Me, there is no fear of sentimentality creeping into our judgment of
this performance. Joe is in fine form and the session, brilliantly recorded by Adrian Wong is an unqualified delight. The performance documents a musician at peace with himself and simply wanting to play the music that he loves, unadorned and in the
most personal way. If there is a
surprise in this mix it comes from the knowledge that the rhythm section of
Peter Barshay on bass and Dave Rokeach on drums play so superbly in-sync with
Beck, having been chosen by the owner Anna De Leon and having never before
played with the guitarist. At one point in the program Beck calls out his rhythm
section as being “stupid good”, a laudatory reference to Barshay and Rockeach’s
intuitive playing.
The set is made up of
standards, but Beck proves his affinity for creating tiny masterpieces of
invention- delicate introductions that lead us into the familiar melodies. The
brilliant interplay is evident from the very beginning on Victor Young’s oft
played “Stella by Starlight,” a creative highlight, which finds Beck weaving
marvelous passages through the melody as Barshay provides equally facile
responses. The guitarist plays Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind” on two
versions on the album, the last one cut for radio play. Channeling his bluesier side either easily worth the
price of admission. The guitarist employs beautiful single line runs, plays
octaves ala Wes and compliments the melodies with delicate chord work using no
effects, sometimes taking a ballad from filigreed solo into a swinging jam.
Beck has an affinity for playing Brazilian music. He starts Bonfa’s
”Manha de Carnival” with a delicately
played intro that quotes Jobim’s “Insensatez” before playing the main theme. He
has a telepathic communication with drummer Rockeach on this one and the effect is magical.
Throughout the
recording you are drawn to the guitarist’s thoughtful approach to the standards “…my aim on the guitar is to try to
get each chord to follow the preceding chord like it was meant to be there, and
then sort of hint at what the next chord might be.” The program includes a wonderful rendition of “Alone
Together” a Bill Evans favorite, “I Can’t Get Started”, a rousing “You the
Night and the Music” and a beautiful take on “Tenderly” that goes from a slow sensitive ballad to a more adventurous exploration of the theme with some of Beck’s faster single line runs.
Listening to Joe play on this album is like being led down a
newly discovered path in a familiar wood. You re-discover the wonderment and
beauty of memorable melodies that he treats with such respect and creativity. Pure artistry by a man with
nothing to prove; an adventure that can thrill if you allow your heart and mind
to be openly immersed in the experience. If Joe Beck somehow had the desire, the dream
to leave one last recorded legacy of what this music really meant to him, then
surely the brilliantly recorded Get Me is a wonderfully realized
dream. Thanks Joe you are missed.
Here are two very different performances by the inimitable Joe Beck:
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