George Benson – Virtuoso of Legendary Jazz Guitar Music – Part 2

In 1961, jazz guitarist George Benson got his break thanks to an unexpected opportunity. Hammond’s organist, brother Jack McDuff, was passing through with his trio minus the guitarist. Benson was immediately recommended for the position and ended up “filling in” for the next three years as he went through the most challenging phase of his jazz guitar music career. Although he had a magnificent sense of time and a deep rhythm, he lacked harmonic and melodic knowledge and could not read music. With McDuff’s constant encouragement, Benson studied hard and acquired the necessary skills. Meanwhile, he met the giants of jazz guitar music Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall, and Wes Montgomery. Wes became a virtual mentor to the promising young guitarist. Prestige Records realized his impressive jazz guitar skills and in 1964 Benson recorded “The New Boss Guitar of George Benson With the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet”. Publicity and critical acclaim persuaded him to perform alone and he formed his own quartet in 1965. Along with most jazz musicians of the time, the group fought in the clubs until Columbia’s talent scout extraordinaire. Records, John Hammond, listened to him and signed him to the main label. Preferring to feature him as a vocalist during those difficult times for jazz, Columbia had him sing various tunes on his two albums. In 1967, Benson left Columbia for Verve Records, where he recorded two albums.

Still looking for an empathetic label, in 1968 he joined A&M Records, where he became a stablemate of Wes Montgomery. Wes had interceded on his behalf with producer Herb Alpert and Benson ended up making three albums for the promising new label. His producer was Creed Taylor, who had engineered Wes’s stalwart commercial success by having him play pop melodies with ear-friendly octaves. Benson took a similar path (to the same critical dismay that followed the “sale” of Wes Montgomery) and when Taylor broke up in 1970 to form his own record label CTI, Benson got carried away.

The concept of CTI Records was revolutionary. Rather than treating jazz as an esoteric art reserved for the jazz music elite, Taylor approached it with a pop sensibility. He gathered together the best young people in jazz and had them play standards, contemporary and original melodies and sweetened the arrangements with orchestral backing tracks. He then wrapped the music in brilliant and visually stunning artwork on album covers. The results were amazing. CTI records sold ten times more than most previous jazz releases! Fortunately for aspiring guitarists, George Benson has published several jazz guitar music tablature books that include many of his recorded guitar solos and instructional DVDs where he teaches his jazz guitar techniques as well as harmonic concepts.