It\u2019s easy to love a Monet, an Ansel Adams, the Red Album Beatles.\u00a0 They are masterful yet accessible; the beauty of their work does not require a great deal of effort for their audience to discern.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little more of a challenge to connect with an artist like a Picasso or an Andy Warhol or, since 1972, a Jeff Beck.<\/p>\n
Since parting ways with first Rod Stewart and then with the entire idea of a vocal pop band, Beck has done two things.\u00a0 One is to repeatedly confirm his status as one of the most exceptionally talented guitarists of his era.\u00a0 The other is to make whatever kind of music he felt like that week\/month\/year\/decade (twice in his career he has made only one album in a ten-year stretch) — critics, record labels and his audience be damned.<\/p>\n
The results have varied from exhilirating (the blistering jazz-fusion of Blow By Blow<\/i> and Wired<\/i>) to invigorating (the heavy album rock of Guitar Shop<\/i>) to exasperating (the electronica-flooded You Had It Coming<\/i>).\u00a0 And most of those same adjectives apply to his latest outing, Performing This Week\u2026 Live At <\/i> The thing it\u2019s important to understand about Beck is that there is simply no one else on earth who plays like him.\u00a0 Sure, there have been plenty of guitarists who have mastered speed-riffing, sustain, effects pedals, bent notes, tapping, etc., etc.\u00a0 But no one does what Beck does, which is, more often than not, to throw the entire bag of tricks into a single song, pour a lifetime\u2019s worth of passion into his playing, and make it all work together.\u00a0 On a track off of 2001\u2019s Jeff<\/i>, guest Saffron raps “If the voice don’t say it, the guitar will play it.”\u00a0 Exactly.\u00a0 Except, most vocalists only wish they had the range of tone and emotion and expressiveness Beck manages using only six strings, ten fingers, and a few knobs and pedals.\u00a0 This album\u2019s liner notes put it another way: \u201cSo does Beck play rock, blues, jazz, techno, funk, world music or rockabilly?\u00a0 The answer is yes.\u00a0 And often all of them at once.\u201d<\/p>\n Opener \u201cBeck\u2019s Bolero\u201d has all the bombast and technical wizardry of the Truth<\/i> original, with 30 years\u2019 worth of accumulated wisdom augmenting it.\u00a0 Future generations will listen to this recording for hours trying to figure how he got all those tones and flavors out of one guitar, live, on the fly.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a clue, myself.<\/p>\n Next he offers a nod to a major influence with a quick run at John McLaughlin\u2019s \u201cEternity\u2019s Breath\u201d before stepping into the sixth dimension, wrenching otherworldly squonks and bleats out of his ax between runs at the assertive central riff of Billy Cobham\u2019s \u201cStratus.\u201d\u00a0 Soon after, \u201cBehind The Veil\u201d feels like an inside-out instrumental run at Eric Clapton\u2019s version of \u201cI Shot The Sheriff,\u201d with its bluesy soloing over a reggae-tinged \u00a0rhythm section. <\/p>\n \u201cYou Never Know,\u201d from 1980\u2019s There & Back<\/i>, is one of the final statements from Beck\u2019s Jan Hammer fusion phase and fits like a glove with the later-on (and spectacular) \u201cLed Boots\u201d from its predecessor Wired<\/i>.\u00a0 In between, the gorgeous \u201cNadia\u201d eases the throttle back and provides a spacious backdrop for a series of runs that range from swerving s-curves to gently soulful sustain.\u00a0 \u201cAngel (Footsteps)\u201d finds Beck soloing high on the fretboard over a slumbering blues rhythm section, bending notes to the point where they twirl like a kaleidoscope.<\/p>\n On \u201cBig Block,\u201d like the closing \u201cWhere Were You\u201d taken from 1990\u2019s Guitar Shop<\/i>, Beck\u2019s bandmates build a heavy foundation over which he layers solos that sound like Jimmy Page as heard through a trans-galactic wormhole — fat, shredding runs of distorted, extended notes that sound as otherworldly as anything Joe Satriani as ever managed.<\/p>\n A special treat near the finish is Beck\u2019s mind-blowing take on \u201cA Day In The Life,\u201d a model of restraint in the early going as the maestro gives it a straight-up Albert Collins-style blues treatment and massages the melody beautifully.\u00a0 And then the psychedelic middle section breaks in and Beck is all over the pl As mentioned in the opening of this review, this is not an easy album to love.\u00a0 It twists and turns and sheds and adopts musical identities as quickly as an actor in a one-man show with 14 speaking parts.\u00a0 But for the audience member with the fortitude to listen and perhaps learn from one of the greatest guitarists of our time, my advice is simple: buy this and prepare to have your mind blown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5952],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41247","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-jeff-beck","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41247"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}