Jeff Beck

Steve Miller, Kirk Hammett, Warren Haynes, Little Steven.. those were some of the heavy cats in the crowd that night in New York at The Iridium as Jeff Beck and friends raucously saluted Les Paul with a tribute. Sporting a fat hollow-body Les Paul, Beck and the band appear in period attire like they were headed to a bowling alley in the Leave It To Beaver-era. They perform all covers of tracks originally featuring Les Paul or from the original rock n' roll period.

"If the voice don't say it, the guitar will play it," raps Saffron on "Pork-U-Pine," the third track on Jeff Beck's minimally titled Jeff. And he does. Beck teams with producer Andy Wright, the man responsible for his more complete immersion into electronic backdrops on his last outing, You Had It Coming. This time the transition is complete. Beck used electronica first on Who Else!, moved a little more into the fire on You Had It Coming, and here merges his full-on Beck-Ola guitar heaviness with the sounds of contemporary spazz-out big beats and noise.

Continuing with the same group lineup as on Rough and Ready, Jeff Beck Group was slagged off by critics for Steve Cropper's admittedly lazy production. However, several of the songs hold up masterfully, including the skronky "Ice Cream Cakes," the superlative redo of Don Nix's "Going Down," and the beautifully sad and wistful instrumental, "Definitely Maybe." Beware of early, poor-sounding versions…

In the summer of 2016, guitar virtuoso Jeff Beck celebrated 50 years of his musical career with an extraordinary concert at the famous Hollywood Bowl. Beck set the stage ablaze with incredible live versions of “For Your Love”, “Beck’s Bolero”, “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers”, “Big Block”, “Over Under Sideways Down”, “A Day In The Life”, “Blue Wind”, and more. The night also included a legendary list of special guests including Steven Tyler, Billy F. Gibbons, Jan Hammer, Beth Hart, Jimmy Hall and Buddy Guy and concluded with an group encore of “Purple Rain” in honor of Prince.

When it was originally released in June 1969, Beck-Ola, the Jeff Beck Group's second album, featured a famous sleeve note on its back cover: "Today, with all the hard competition in the music business, it's almost impossible to come up with anything totally original. So we haven't. However, this disc was made with the accent on heavy music. So sit back and listen and try and decide if you can find a small place in your heads for it."…

Blow by Blow typifies Jeff Beck's wonderfully unpredictable career. Released in 1975, Beck's fifth effort as a leader and first instrumental album was a marked departure from its more rock-based predecessors…

After a life-threatening car accident forced him to take an extended break, guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Beck re-emerged in 1971 with a new band, a new album (Rough and Ready), and an attempt to merge a soulful Memphis sound with hard rock. 1972's Jeff Beck Group shows that Beck was already moving beyond his soul-rock hybrid and sowing the seeds for his exceptional mid-'70s jazz/rock fusion work. Jeff Beck Group also served as a precursor to Beck's next project, the blues-soul-rock trio Beck, Bogart & Appice. Produced by Booker T. & the M.G.'s guitarist Steve Cropper, Jeff Beck Group contains "Going Down," one of Beck's best-known tracks and a perennial concert favorite, as well as the album-opening highlight "Ice Cream Cakes." An important, transitional album in the career of this stylistically adventurous guitarist.

"If the voice don't say it, the guitar will play it," raps Saffron on "Pork-U-Pine," the third track on Jeff Beck's minimally titled Jeff. And he does. Beck teams with producer Andy Wright, the man responsible for his more complete immersion into electronic backdrops on his last outing, You Had It Coming. This time the transition is complete. Beck used electronica first on Who Else!, moved a little more into the fire on You Had It Coming, and here merges his full-on Beck-Ola guitar heaviness with the sounds of contemporary spazz-out big beats and noise. Beck and Wright employ Apollo 440 on "Grease Monkey" and "Hot Rod Honeymoon," and use a number of vocalists, including the wondrously gifted Nancy Sorrell, on a host of tracks, as well as the London Session Orchestra on others (such as "Seasons," where hip-hop, breakbeats, and old-school Tangerine Dream sequencing meet the guitarist's deep blues and funk-drenched guitar stylings)…