jeff thanks for everything

I don’t know if I’ve ever commented on these “Rock Papers” – I suppose so- but in any case here I manifest it. Whenever I sit in front of the Mac and start these articles that I find it so pleasant to share with each and everyone readers of The regionIt is a pleasure for me to tell stories, rediscover records, narrate episodes that were unknown or not well explained in their day about everything that rock has left us in more than half a century of history, in short, to enjoy music in another way. … Today, I think it is the first time in the almost five years that I have been sharing these articles, which, in all sincerity, I find extremely sad and I would almost say painful to write this article. But the first commandment of journalism is not negotiable: current events rule.

This past January 11, 2023 has died Jeff Beck. According to the brief statement made public by his family and his closest circle, due to bacterial meningitis, a sudden illness that ended his life when he was still fully active, preparing new tours and having recorded both a magnificent collaboration this past year on Ozzy Osbourne’s latest album, ‘Pattient Nº9′, which we also talked about here at the time as an excellent album called ’18’ together with actor Johnny Depp, who in recent years has also developed a parallel career in music through through the group he shares with Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Hollywood Vampires. Perhaps the fact of knowing that he was not, as in other cases, in the course of a serious illness or that he was retired from music for health reasons, has made the unexpected blow harder. In fact, his physical appearance was excellent, he looked much younger than he was at the time of his death -78 years old- and I think there were not a few of us who were convinced that, like the Jaggers, Dylan, Townsend, Plant or others of his generation, he still had a career ahead of him.

Certainly, the fact that he was not a hit-singles-generating musician, that without being a hermit either, he almost always kept a safe distance from the press, that he always kept his private life out of the media spotlight and The fact that he was away from the stage during some periods of his career, such as in the 80s, when he suffered from tinnitus, did not make him as popular or well-known guitarist as, for example, Eric Clapton. However, and still greatly respecting “slowhand”, I understand that Jeff Beck was always much better compositionally and technically than Clapton and in my opinion, I think that together with Jimi Hendrix he was the great revolutionary in rock history, not only as a creator together to the one from Seattle of the musical bases of hard rock and heavy metal when he formed his The Jeff Beck Group in 1967 with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood and which he captured so brilliantly on his albums ‘Truth’ (1968) and ‘Beck-Ola’ ( 1969); Throughout his entire career, with the exception of those periods of inactivity, he was a tireless explorer of new sounds, an enthusiast of the fusion of rock with other styles and a born experimenter, risky, brave and always, in any circumstance, brilliant.

As fate would have it, very shortly after the abrupt breakup of The Jeff Beck Group during their tour of the United States in the summer of 1969, just the eve of performing at the Woodstock Festival, he suffered a car accident that kept him almost a year away from musical activity. Once recovered and back, he opted in what would be a constant in his career, to completely reinvent The Jeff Beck Group and join musicians of the category of Max Middleton and Cozy Powell to record ‘Rough And Ready’ (1971) with them. ) and ‘Jeff Beck Group’ (1972), in which he oriented his style towards canons more typical of jazz rock and fusion with an inspiration and a quality that personally never failed to impress me.

What was to be a new version of The Jeff Beck Group became Beck, Bogert & Appice, who I think was not wrongly called in the English music press “the Cream of the 70s” and who left an album of the most immense hard rock ever recorded in the ’70s. After a more evolutionary and eclectic stage with Max Middleton, he largely returned to his prog blues and proto-hard rock roots on a project that sadly It lasted a very short time.

In a personal interview that I had the opportunity to do with the great drummer Carmine Appice, he told me when I asked him about Beck that, as often happens with great geniuses, he sometimes had a very impulsive and unpredictable character, which was especially manifested when he was starting to get tired of the project he had started, or when he thought he had a better idea in his head. This led him to break BB&A in 1974 and start a solo career that left us masterpieces such as ‘Blow By Blow’ (1975), ‘Wired’ (1976) and the legendary live album ‘Jeff Beck with the Jan’ in those years. Hammer Group Live’ (1977).

Here Jeff Beck leaned heavily towards jazz rock, always surrounding himself with excellent musicians, a quality he always maintained -he was the discoverer of music in the category of Tal Wilkenfeld or Jennifer Batten- and he knew how to give his career a radical turn, but without leaps. in the void nor incoherent lurches. Quite the contrary, despite the constant changes in each of the projects he undertook, when listening to his discography in depth, there is a line of continuity of a style, a technique and above all, such a marked personality, so accused, capable of providing such an indisputable stamp of identity to everything he did, that this made it easier for him to put himself at the same level, if not superior to that of the generation of great guitar virtuosos from the Berkeley School in his ‘Guitar Shop’. ‘ from 1989 with Terry Bozzio and Tony Hymas, revolutionizing electronic music on their ‘Who Else!’ (1999) and ‘You Had It Coming’ (2001) and being the guest star of musicians like Mick Jagger, Tina Turner or Jon Bon Jovi in ​​many of their projects, including the most recent and already mentioned Ozzy Osbourne and Johnny Depp.

In music, communicating and transmitting with the voice, when expressing a sincere feeling, which comes from the heart, is not easy, but it is less easy to do it with the guitar in instrumental rock. Very few have achieved it throughout history. Jeff Beck, undoubtedly the best of them all.

Bye teacher. The magic of your music, of your imagination, of your creativity, the emotion and the feeling that you created in entire generations of rock lovers will always remain alive in our hearts. Jeff… just thank you for everything.