The Music of Jeff Beck (1944-2023): A Memorial

Incredibly, it has been eight years since I last published a blog post to this thing (I do see I have some drafts from more recent days that I just never bothered to publish, oh well). 

However, the passing of Jeff Beck seems like an appropriate occasion to revisit it. I frankly have way more to say about this than twitter or a facebook post could contain. 

Let me acknowledge the obvious. Those of you on my facebook friends list might be getting weirded out by the amount of Beck posts and shares from me. I fully admit this is odd to the normies out there, and I don't mean that in a stupid elitist way. I never met this man in person. At most I breathed the same air in the same building during concerts. Many of my friends and family have artists they like, but the loss of those artists wouldn't affect them other than a simple "oh darn, that sucks." This is understandable and sensible. 

I never like to assume anyone actually cares about my thoughts, especially on music ("sigh there goes that music snob going on again!"), but please indulge me as I try to explain why I feel the way I do. 

Well. How do I feel? On the day I learned he passed (Wednesday January 11th, as I was sitting in my office- just scrolling facebook, and I see the post by his family), I was emotional. I definitely teared up as I thought about his music, especially his more emotional material like "Where Were You" which seemed especially poignant. 

Note: by no means is this post meant to be *any* type of pity party because his actual family and friends are no doubt struggling with powerful grief, just be crystal clear on that.

Second Note: My family has been so sweet and kind to me. Again: this doesn't affect their life at all-, yet they've been so nice. Erica was very kind and Helena randomly came up to me simply to say "I'm sorry that guitarist you liked died." Its appreciated. 

But after that day, the actual sadness was gone. It was replaced by melancholy- not the overpowering, "I can't do anything" type, more just a weird pall that gently hung over everything. I'll admit here that for the past few months I've been struggling with my place in the musical world (once again, not in an overpowering "everything sucks" way, it's just been something I've been thinking about a lot). Ironically this was triggered by seeing this very artist Jeff Beck in concert in Chicago in October (sure glad I did that!). When I witness high level artistry, it kicks me in the butt. What am I doing with the guitar and music? Anything? That sort of thing. 

I've been processing this mostly in a healthy way: by playing a *ton* more guitar. Guitar doesn't put food on the table for me (at best a handful of private lessons keep it from being a drain), so it's easy for me to minimize it. From about Spring 2021 until last November my playing had been pretty minimal: playing in church and doing my few private lessons. Since seeing Beck I had been in guitar overdrive, playing as much as I can. Also, admittedly, I do what *all* guitarists do when they feel musically depressed but aren't gigging: buy gear. In my case, nothing astronomical: an inexpensive Epiphone 335 copy (one of the last body styles I wanted in my arsenal), and a pedal board mostly filled with cheap pedals. 

Random aside: since I don't normally follow celebrity news at all, I am aghast at the industry that is apparently devoted to cranking out click bait content the very moment a famous person dies. My social feeds are awash in the stuff: "Jeff Beck's devastating final interview" and "his LAST moments" as well as just "read the wikipedia page" style phony documentaries. Ugly stuff. 

Second random aside: My playing in the church band is a very meaningful experience that I am blessed to be able to do, which I want to make clear just in case! If all God wants me to do musically is blow off steam at home and play church music on Sundays, His will be done! 

I also ran off to the local record store in hopes of snagging the Beckology box set, mainly because it's a beautiful package and includes Jeff's early work with the Tridents, a rhythm n' blues band that played Eel Pie Island. There are a few more pre-Yardbirds artifacts out there: I think he did some stuff with Screamin' Lord Sutch and there was a band called The Nightshift. In the Lafayette area there are some awesome used record stores and sure enough, I found it, cheaper than the eBay scalpers were selling them for. 

Mostly, however, I've been thinking about his music a lot. Like, all the time, almost a constant loop. The melancholy remains, though I feel it slowly evolving into appreciation. 

Appreciation for what, exactly? It's time for an enumerated list! 

1. Jeff Beck was the bridge to jazz music and instrumental music for me. When I listened to Blow by Blow as a teenager, I was initially put off by it. I was listening to a steady diet of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple then (which was what made me initially pick up the guitar). Blow by Blow sounded so weird at first: funky chords, no vocals, the songs weren't just the blues played really loud! I had never heard electric piano before on a recording (I now absolutely love the 1970s Fender Rhodes piano sound). 

Funny thing though: sometimes when you listen to something you think you don't like, something sticks. I can't remember which one stuck first: the solo break in Scatterbrain or this lick from Cause We've Ended as Lovers, but they were both moments that didn't leave my brain once they entered. And of course Freeway Jam is a whole bop as the kids say. From there, the rest of the album opened up and suddenly it became an obsession. It was all I listened to for months. Better yet, I began the process of exploring the influences that Jeff had: John McLaughlin, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham's Spectrum album. These were the first jazz records that weren't Django Reinhardt or the odd Wes Montgomery thing that I actually loved. 

Eventually this led to listening to Jim Hall's Concierto album, the first "straight ahead" jazz album I loved, and I was off to the races then, listening to Miles, Coltrane, Monk, etc. 

2. Seeing Jeff live. I saw him in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1999 with my good friend Tony. Holy crap, that was a concert. He was touring with Jennifer Batten, Randy Hope-Taylor and Steve Alexander. It was a great band. Seeing Jeff live is an experience that fails words. The best I can do is this: you just can't believe the sounds he makes. The music is astounding. The purity of tone, the adventurism, the pure emotional power of his playing is transformative. 

I didn't see him as much as I would have liked, but I can't complain on this score. I saw him again in Detroit, Milwaukee, and finally in Chicago last October. Each time was awesome. 

3. The Jeff Beck community. Jeff was never mega popular: popular enough to pack mid-sized venues, certainly. But not so popular that you felt his community as out of reach due to the sheer numbers of it. The center of Jeff Beck fandom was a website that was and remains delightfully "web 1.0." It has undergone a few host name changes over the years, but is now at YellowDeuce.com. It looks *exactly* like it did in 1998, complete with scrolling text.

Reading the latest "what's new" posting was always so much fun: not only did it have news of tours and music releases, but the site authors Bill Armstrong and the late Dick Wyzanski were true Beckologists, finding all kinds of rare artifacts and even interviewing musicians that played with Jeff on various side-projects and unreleased attempts at albums. Even now, it remains a treasure trove of material. 

The community then moved to an old yahoo email group, which lasted until Yahoo got rid of those, and is currently manifested in Sheila Melms' wonderful facebook page. To be a Jeff Beck fan is to be hardcore, and knowledgeable. As you might guess, probably most of us actually play guitar ourselves. 

4. Sharing Beck's music with others. Admittedly, Jeff Beck isn't going to be the type of music that you can hook lots of your friends and family on. At least, the music he did outside of the most popular stuff, the Rod Stewart Jeff Beck Group records, The Yardbirds, and *possibly* Blow by Blow. I remember my late grandmother being particularly disgusted with a concert from the Who Else! tour that I use to watch all the time at my parent's house. "That isn't music, it's just noise!" she said. Of course, happily, when Jeff launched into Angel Footsteps she did voice her approval. Beck's ballads have universal appeal. 

I had a lot of fun watching Jeff Beck videos and listening to records with my first guitar teacher, John. I'd go to his house, we'd smoke some cigars, and just *listen to Jeff's music.* Btw, when is the last time you simply listened to music as the primary activity in your home. Not a live concert, but actually sat in a comfortable chair and really listened to just music. This, to me, is a lost art. Even I don't do much of this anymore.  I'm trying to do it more, because a lot of Beck's music isn't great for jogging or for just "background work noise." 

The other group I shared his music with was, of course, other musicians! The first time I attempted to play Jeff's music was my sophomore year of college, playing Cause We've Ended as Lovers in the college jazz ensembles. We kinda sucked, although part of that suckitude was being nervous at the firing squad atmosphere of jazz education. I remember getting berated for playing in a seated position: "You can't play rock music sitting down!" (That was probably a merited criticism).

A little later on I would play Definitely Maybe as a regular tune in the fusion band I had in our live set. Shortly after graduating, I was invited to a rehearsal at the house of a trombone player who was trying to create an RnB showband type thing. I cooked up an arrangement of AIR Blower from Blow by Blow (saxophone, guitar, bass, drums, trombone). The group never got going, but one glorious rehearsal the trombonist, Mike, arranged for a ringer- a working pro drummer he paid to sit in with us- so we could have a rehearsal. He was a motown influenced player who sounded, well, utterly perfect, just like the record. For one glorious random evening in a Toledo area house, I played AIR Blower with fantastic musicians with an absolutely powerhouse rhythm section. That was special. 

5. Absorbing Jeff's musical ideas and musical ethics.

This is a tricky one. As famous YouTube guitar influencer Rick Beato put it, he is uncopyable. This isn't hyperbole. Jeff's playing style is such a marvelously odd amalgamation of things that are just about impossible to imitate well. 

What you can do, however, is imitate the attitude and what I'll call "musical ethics." What are those? Probably its own blog post, but in short, to be daring and improvisational, to be lyrical, to be technical but never, ever for its own sake. It is to keep getting better and better no matter how old you are. Jeff Beck at 78 was better than Jeff Beck at 50 who was better than Jeff Beck at 30 or 20. 

Because I use a pick and do not have the rockabilly influence, there is going to be a limit to how much "Beck" is in my own guitar art. However, I did record one track (around 2015, released in 2019) in which I can detect a strong Beck influence in both the playing and the musical content. The music is free-form and overly long, so I'll send you to a time-stamped version here: 

https://youtu.be/9dmRaANNYtY?t=120

I was particularly proud of this track for that reason. The lead lines are playful yet melancholy, which is definitely Jeff Beck's influence at work (and or course I used a strat-style guitar for this!). While not dedicated to Beck, the title, "Goodbye for Now," might as well be. 

So where do we go from here? I wonder if Jeff Beck will inspire "Jeff Beck Societies" in the way truly great classical composers have, or the way Django Reinhardt inspired things have inspired bands like the "Hot Club of San Francisco" and "The Hot Club of Detroit." If such things happened, I'd love to be a part of them. I think in the immediate short term, it's just a time to dive ever-deeper into the legacy. Strangely, I haven't actually transcribed a lot of Beck solos, so that is something I'll remedy (I've already assigned a guitar student a Beck solo, which means I'll be learning it first to show him). 

I have dreams of owning an Oxblood Les Paul, like on the cover of Blow by Blow. Alas, Gibson makes it impossible as these guitars are now selling for INSANE prices. I have designs on perhaps trying to build one myself from a cheap guitar kit (you can get oxblood guitar finish). 

But more broadly, and more importantly, the main thing here is to continue to express myself on the guitar and musically. I've doing OK with that, but I can do a whole lot more. I need to find the courage to play out in public, at least in the limited sense my life allows for. Most of all, I need to continue to get better and better and better at my own guitar playing. That lifelong dedication to craft: that is so vital. 

Finally, let me say something spiritual. Jeff never talked about that much, but as for myself, I am a Christian (another reason why I love "People Get Ready" so much, his one gospel tune!), so as I stated on my facebook page, I have faith that God collects all culture of the world and uses it in the New Creation (Heaven), so I do expect to hear Jeff Beck music there! And it will be glorious. 

Rest in Peace, Jeff. Thanks for the music. 

Classic Albums: "Birds of Fire" By the Mahavishnu Orchestra

Warning: if you hate jazz fusion, this blog won't be much fun for you. Many of my personal favorite albums are in this somewhat maligned, often misunderstood category.

This is one of the all time best.

Pretty much everyone enters the Jazz Fusion "world" via some fairly toe tapping, easier listening entry point. Mine was Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow,* yours might have been a Herbie Hancock album, or even stuff on the absolute borderline of the genre, such as early Chicago. Some are happy to camp out here, in the margins, confined to relatively simple harmonies and steady, medium funky tempos (no shame in that, it's still more demanding music than any Train album). Others, though, go a little deeper.

And it doesn't get any deeper than the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Birds of Fire is probably their most famous album; and maybe their best, although at times I've gone back and forth between that and The Inner Mounting Flame. But for personal influence, Birds of Fire wins the day, as it was my first exposure to the band.

The album starts out with that famous gong - boooooooosh, BOOOOOOOOSH, then John McLaughlin starts up with that incredible distorted electric twelve string guitar... then, a watershed moment for fusion fans- that odd time signature riff on the violin and bass repeating again and again - then the lead guitar just EXPLODES- it's a shot fired from a cannon, played with fiery conviction at maximum volume. And oh yeah, melodically it also makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

The melody just builds and builds over top this spacey, bizarre chord progression, until finally at 2:50 or so the composition breaks into something resembling normalcy- the little resolution of the section. This track is followed by a bluesy and completely conventional "Miles Beyond," but my favorite cut is "One Word," which captures a Mahavishnu trademark- letting a groove sit and build, and build, and build, and build... until finally coalescing into an epic climax at the end. The trick with this though is you can't bore the listener during all the building- you somehow have to maintain interest, which of course they accomplish easily (greatly aided by the drumming of Billy Cobham, whose work on the toms in particular sounds like its own composition that could stand completely on its own).

The music overall is strange, weird, other worldy... but also very, very awesome. At age 19ish, this was pretty mind bending stuff. It also set the gold standard for how awesome jazz fusion, when practiced as an art and not some commercial endeavor, could be.

As far as my own playing, McLaughlin's electric guitar playing was, for a long time, second only to Jeff Beck in terms of influence. Unfortunately, my ability to play those ferocious tremelo picked lines has vanished along with my college era 4+ hour per day practicing regimen. But that's OK- I rarely have use for them anymore, even when I'm playing jazz rock by myself, I don't necessarily find myself wanting to play that way (I'd also really want a true Les Paul style guitar for it as well). You can hear me play this way mostly on the Paragon albums, What Is Paragon and Patience, and a bit on Zeitgeber. But even on those recordings I didn't do this type of playing as much as I did during live shows.

I can recall one college guitar ensemble chart, kicking on a distortion pedal (direct to the board! Yuck!) and playing a bunch of those tremelo picked McLaughlin lines, and the audience going nuts- probably one of the best reactions my playing ever received- and getting the requisite slight resentment from folks in the jazz program (you aren't allowed to play badass rock licks and get attention! It must be bebop stuff that nobody cares about!**). Something similar occurred at one of my gigs at the Easy Street Cafe on Main Street Bowling Green.

It was that type of response that tricked me into thinking that maybe more than ten people actually liked this type of music enough to pay a cover charge to see it- a foolhardy mistake that led me to pursue Paragon as a band (a really wonderful, fun, positive mistake that I'd happily make a million times over if I had to do it again, by the way).

In the early to mid 1970s, however, it was indeed possible to not only fill small clubs, but even large stadiums by playing this oddball music. After all, Jeff Beck toured in SUPPORT of Mahavishnu in the 70s, which is really hard to believe but absolutely true! People want to immediately assume drugs, as if that is the only reason why people would like music that isn't just three chords "and the truth." As I love this stuff while only high on caffeine, I would bet at least a portion of the original 1970s audience felt likewise.


*Which isn't to knock, at all, Blow by Blow - my favorite album *of all time, in any category.*
**To be fair, "they," being other students and other professors, rightly focused on the kinds of playing that you went to school for, and not impressed with the type of stuff you did on your own before you got there, a totally fair critique of my playing at the time.

Classic Albums: Lawrence of Arabia Original Soundtrack

You learn a lot about yourself when spending late evenings with an infant child, particularly when aided by Amazon's Instant Video service. When browsing this late one night while gently bouncing my youngest to sleep, I noticed "Lawrence of Arabia" in the freebie list. So I started watching it.

If you haven't watched this movie before, you might think your streaming service of choice has become broken, because the movie starts with an extended overture sequence; the screen is completely black as the soundtrack plays.

The soundtrack is the absolute standard of Western rendering of middle east music. The melodic content is sumptuous, romantic yet driving. It'll say locked in your head forever after the first hearing, and the classic film doesn't have to do any heavy lifting whatsoever- this music would be just as epic without Peter O'Toole. That Maurice Jarre also composed the music to Ghost is one of those bizarre aspects of a film scoring career, I suppose.

My recent watching of this movie reminded me not only of my love of the score, but how extremely influential it was on my own composing afterward. Much of my musical output afterward was just restatements of the main theme in various colors. I'm not ashamed to admit that- it's freaking terrific music.

And, of course, there were times I did this on purpose instead of accidentally. This was a tune called "A Lament for TE," which is obvious enough. It's a simple medium swinger (I have a lovely recorded version of it with Jason Gahler and Ben Wolkins) that was a staple of my non-jazz rock gigs in the early to mid 2000's, particularly when I played at Manhattan's in Toledo.

But the influence pops up in many other places. It's all over the place on Zeitgeber- The Big Hello and The Big Goodbye both have that moorish by way of Hollywood thing. It was and is a part of my improvisations as well.

That said, I got to lean on this inspiration in a big way when I was contracted to compose a video game score for an unreleased game called "The Broken Hourglass." The game took place in a fictionalized place but it was modeled after the middle east, so I basically got to compose my own "Lawrence of Arabia" score. It was great fun, though getting that music to you all is a little complicated in that it is technically Planewalker Games LLC's music, though I think if I pushed a bit I could convince the stake holders of that project to allow me to throw it up somewhere.

In closing, Jarre's score is perhaps the pinnacle of the operatic style of Hollywood film scoring, with big melodies you'd leave the cinema humming. Today underscoring and atmosphere is the rage, perhaps best personified with the "BLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHRGGG" of "Inception" - scores that are more kaleidoscopes of sound than stand alone musical compositions. I like some of that- it can be very effective, but I'm a creature of melodies, ultimately. Very occasionally, a series of films comes out the revives the Lawrence of Arabia style, most notably the Lord of the Rings movies with their fantastic scores by Howard Shore. But as great as Shore's Rings music is, it doesn't hold to the delicious depth and emotive content of Lawrence of Arabia.

*Note: if you are interesting in acquiring this music, here is a case where tracking down the original vinyl LP would be worth it. I did find a pretty cheap mp3 reissuing of the original, and it is OK, but ultimately this would sound best on a turntable with good speakers. Barring that, you should probably give one of the re-recordings a try. 

Classic Albums: John Abercrombie's Timeless

I'm pretty sure I picked up Timeless like I did many of the Jazz recordings I purchased while studying at BGSU for a performance major in guitar: from Finder's Music on mainstreet Bowling Green. I bought ridiculous amounts of music back then- it was my version of retail therapy. Have a great day, maybe a good performance on a Friday afternoon recital? Buy some music. Get shot down by the gal who worked at the gas station down the street? Buy more music. Bored and no gigs? More music.

I can't really remember why I bought Timeless, but it was probably because I had heard the upperclassmen play some of Abercrombie's music in a recital performance, music from the Gateway album.

Right away I was taken by the rapid fire nature of the opening track, "Lungs." I was still at a stage in my appreciation of improvised music that I needed a bit of rock n' roll to keep my attention, and the hot electric guitar that Abercrombie played hooked me in. This was fortunate, as this kept me involved as a listener, allowing me to appreciate the finer points of the interaction between musicians during later listenings.

It was also my introduction to the "ECM Sound," and no, I don't mean the writer for Gamefan magazine- I mean the label that would kind of define 1970s jazz - austere album covers (I loved the album design for Timeless so much that I essentially copied this for Zeitgeber) combined with music that sounded like it was recorded in large concert halls as opposed to tiny recording studio rooms with foam padding.

I'm one of those people who see music in colors, and Timeless to me always evokes a black void, with dancing lines of color exploding forth- the expansiveness of the "ECM Sound" fully at work. And oh, the sounds of Jan Hammer! Like so many things Jan plays on, he tends to chew scenery, but everyone is up to the task of matching him. "Red and Orange" is my second favorite track, which features Jan's organ work, which almost sounds like something from Rick Wakeman.

But to me, the thing that makes Timeless special is that it is unusually aggressive for Abercrombie. His style is pretty understated and after getting "spoiled" by the burning of Timeless, I went on a fruitless quest to find more of his work that was in that style- and was sadly disappointed (only "Gateway" would come close). It isn't to say that his playing isn't very good- but I wanted to hear him burn, and he just doesn't do that on recordings (though I did like his standards album with Scofield).

As for its influence on me, I think the constant ostinato droning and long form interaction had a huge impact. You probably hear it most on things like "Short Expedition #2" and "Short Expedition #1" on the Paragon albums, and you hear it all over the place on Zeitgeber, which in many ways was my attempt to do the ECM thing, though with much more of a rock edge. When I would play with guys at the Easy Street Cafe, we'd often to these long form jams just like on Timeless- trying to do those interesting interactions with each other- group conversations, not hampered by "changes" like in Bebop, but not throwing all the tonality out the window either- Free jazz with some rules to make it somewhat listenable.

Of course my friends and I couldn't really approach what these legends were doing, but it helped us grow as players to try. Later, when I did my brief attempt at grad school in jazz studies, I was really turned off by the student's attempts to "play free-" it just came off as aggressive chaos; I'd like to think that spinning this record a few times for them would have gotten them back down to earth.

It is finally here! Pitch to Pixel Volume 2!

FINALLY the page went live on CDBaby this morning!

So please do check it out! I spent some time listening to PtP 1 and 2 back to back, to compare. PtP 1 has some great moments, for sure, but I think I write with a lot less "fat" on PtP 2, as I've gained a bit more focus and discipline to my writing since 2010. Anyway, as any long time readers of the blog know, now begins the quest of "making back the money I spent to make it," which took something like 8 months or whatever last time. Here's hoping for a quicker turnaround!

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/robhoward3

Pitch to Pixel Song Profiles: Fantastical Prelude

Fantastical Prelude was actually the very first song I completed. I had, of course, a certain JRPG series in mind (a "Final" sort of fantasy, if you will!), and I worried that I would be a little too imitative.

But after finishing this, I was really happy with it. Then something funny happened. The melody stuck in my head FOREVER. Just repeated itself over and over again. Which is exactly what you want (but you can't predict which melodies will do that).

Part of it is a particular VST (virtual instrument) I used: "monomate," a monochromatic synth that has a mini-moog type of sound: deep and rich. It also doesn't process faster passages very well, creating charming processing errors that actually sound cool!

For some reason, I got it in my head that somewhere somebody would want to use this track to highlight some powerful scene in a romance/drama type of movie, and I would get this massive royalty from it (hah!). I guess I thought that because of the pretty, but melancholy flavor that it has.

Pitch to Pixel Song Profiles: Open Dragon and Lightning Force

I open PtP 2 with a couple of tracks that signal the album's most distinctive feature from PtP 1: using 16 bit, Sega Genesis style FM synthesis. This was one of my "top requests" so I wanted to honor it.

Open Dragon is actually a homage to a new game, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma. The inspiration is a song they used for the title screen, called "Into Free" by a metal duo called B'z, a Japanese group. It starts slow, then speeds up, which is a simple musical device I like to use.

Lightning Force is, as you might suppose, based on the Thunder Force space shooter series from the Genesis "era" (roughly). These soundtracks had pretty amazing, synthesized heavy metal guitars. But, here is were I kinda go off the "chip" track: while the metal crunchy guitars are the appropriate FM synth sound, the drums are not downsampled here... and that's me playing that guitar solo. I felt an urge to lay down a old fashioned rock guitar solo, so, you know, why not? :-)