Something you should know about me is that I'm a Jeff Beck super mega fanatic. He is my favorite guitarist in any genre, bar none, and there are lots of guitarists I absolutely adore. Grant Green, Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis Django Rheinhardt, John Fogerty are all guitarists that I've admired and greatly enjoyed. I suppose if I was alive when I could have seen these fine players up close in personal, maybe they'd have the top honor (John Fogerty is alive, I just haven't seen him in person).
I'll never forget seeing Beck play in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1999 while he was supporting his "Who Else!" tour. The thing about Jeff Beck is that while many other guitarists have surpassed him in technique (the ability to play lots and lots of notes efficiently), nobody has approached the electric guitar like Jeff Beck has. He uses technique utterly alien to everybody else. He manipulates the basic electronics of the guitar; volume knob, tone nob, whammy bar, tools available to almost everyone on the electric guitar, to create a vocabulary of sounds that makes it seem is though he is using effects. He is not. That is the man, his guitar, and an amp cranked up. That's it.
Nobody else on the instrument has his articulation and phrasing. And while he has lots of rip snortin' tunes in his repertoire (he was always good at playing gonzo guitar), it was on ballads and soulful melodies which the guitarist always shined the most, since this displayed his talent in a way other material could not. After all, it was "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" from his album Blow by Blow that caused me to all in love with his playing. It was full of power and teenage angst; it was a guitar representation of how I felt at the time.
So it makes great sense that he would make a classical album someday, with lush string orchestras and arias. It is this direction that the guitarist heads in "Emotion and Commotion," and I think Beck fans should welcome this development.
The album marks the ending of a very fruitful phase of Beck's career, the "electronica" phase. Starting with 1999's "Who Else!" and ending with "Jeff" in 2003, Beck attempted to broaden his audience by combining his jazz rock blues guitar with Prodigy/Chemical Brothers style beats and sounds. It was wildly successful from an artistic standpoint (Who Else! is one of his finest albums), but by the time Jeff was released in 2003, it was clear that this era should be put to bed. The formula was maybe wearing a little thin, and I don't think he was expanding his audience with this direction.
It took him seven years and a couple of awesome live records to get to his next studio album, but here we are. It opens up with "Corpus Christi Carol," which really is representative of the whole record, with a lush orchestral arrangement that supports but does not dominate Beck's lyrical guitar (the arranger for the strings did a great job). This melts into "Hammerhead," which is a rock n' roll instrumental that hearkens back to Beck's late 80's powerhouse, "Guitar Shop." "Never Alone" showcases the major influence that Indian music has on Beck, while "Somewhere over the Rainbow" is going to be a Jeff Beck concert classic if it hasn't already. Here the amazing vocabulary is on full display: artificial harmonics bent with the whammy bar, volume knob manipulation, clever rhythmic play, and powerhouse scorching. Check out the sweet live performance I've included in this post, and you'll see what I mean. Awesome.
While Beck has made his name as an instrumental performer, he has in recent years included more vocals in his music, usually with he aid of a comely female singer. Here he features Joss Stone on Screamin' Jay Hawkins' old standard "I Put A Spell On You." She is soulful and powerful, and Beck employs his musical taste in perfectly answering her vocal stylings. Imelda May is the other featured gal, and I adore her voice. It is silky and smooth, and full of seductive power. This is on full display on "Lilac Wine."
But it's Beck's guitar that we want, and we get it once again with a gorgeous ballad, this time the aria "Nessun Dorma." "Serenity" is a space rock ballad, recalling tunes like "Angel Footsteps." Finally we have a blues, something Beck always has on his albums regardless of the record's pretense. This time its "Poor Boy."
Jeff Beck is a treasure and a powerful artist. One of the reasons I am a Christian and theist is that music (as well as any and all art) is so utterly powerful that it makes me think that material is not all that there is. What a man like Jeff Beck does, scientifically, is produce soundwaves. Maybe it's mathematically pleasing to us in some way, and yes, our brains appreciate and determine patterns and that plays a role in understanding music. But why does someone move you, to your very core? It isn't just pattern recognition. It is, simply put, God's image in us, His Creation. Great artists are great because, whether they know it or not, they reflect a tiny fraction of God's creativity. And Jeff Beck's creativity lives in his guitar playing.
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