Following Annette Carson’s Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers (2001) and Martin Power’s Hot Wired Guitar: The Life Of Jeff Beck (2014) here is another richly detailed yet flowing take on the life and work of the sui generis guitarist. Even if you know the Carson and Power volumes, if you are a Beck fan you will surely take a great deal from Blow By Blow – its title derived from the well-received mid-1970s fusion album of Beck’s which was produced by George Martin.
In the DVD Still On The Run: The Jeff Beck Story, Eric Clapton – who regularly invited Beck to his annual Crossroads blues festival – says “Not that many rock players ‘get’ jazz. But Jeff does!” A large part of my 2023 obituary of Beck was concerned with Beck’s relationship with jazz. While he would often say that he was not a jazzer but a blues musician working with what he called “elaborated blues with progressive rock overtones”, the jazz element in Beck’s sensibility, his poetics, is undeniable.
Martin Power’s book dealt with such specifics as the 1970s influence on Beck of e.g., Billy Cobham’s Spectrum recording, John McLaughlin’s playing on Right Off from Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson release, and the development of McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. In the 1990s Beck and McLaughlin would collaborate on a fine reading of John Lewis’s Django, released on McLaughlin’s album The Promise. And Power also addressed the possibility of Beck’s kinship with another leading figure from an earlier generation, Barney Kessel, as evinced by the linear grace and chromatic touches of Beck’s solo on Looking For Another Pure Love, on Stevie Wonder’s 1971 Talking Book.
From a jazz point of view, one of the chief values of this study from guitar and rock specialists Tolinski and Gill is how they foreground the intuitive or emotional resonance of jazz for Beck. Here is how Beck characterises key aspects of his development from the early days of the Tridents and, especially, the Yardbirds: “Before the Yardbirds invited me to join, I was already moving toward avant-garde and experimental music – a bit like Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. I’m not comparing myself to them musically, but the essence of what I was doing involved creating the strangest sounds I could. That’s when Eric came down to see me and realised where his job was going.”
Beck rated Elvin Jones (whom he would catch as often as he could at Ronnie Scott’s) as highly as did Charlie Watts (see the 2022 Charlie’s Good Tonight by Paul Sexton). So it seems reasonable enough to read in Blow By Blow that “While Beck sounded nothing like Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane, he shared their ability to convey a visceral physicality in his soloing.”
At the same time, Tolinski and Gill celebrate the resonant tenderness of Beck’s take on Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus’s blues-spun threnody to Lester Young, recorded in 1959 as part of the Mingus Ah Um album and revisited by Beck on the mid-1970s Wired, another George Martin production: “[Beck’s] performance was dazzling […] a dynamic slow burn of jazz and blues that was unmistakably his own. This track marked a turning point – the moment he transitioned from his blues-rock roots with the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group and Beck, Bogart and Appice to the iconoclastic, expressive style that defined the rest of his career.”
That career is then examined (mostly) in appropriate detail: while I welcomed the amount of contextualisation given to Beck’s final album 18, cut with Johnny Depp, I was disappointed to see but scant attention paid to Performing This Week: Jeff Beck At Ronnie Scott’s, the 2015 release of the earlier week-long engagement which gave Beck what he called the happiest time of his career – and a release which came with a suitably jazz-oriented sleeve-note from Charles Shaar Murray, a writer who is cited several times in Blow By Blow. But don’t let that put you off investigating what is a must-read for all enthusiasts and students of Beckology.
Blow By Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by Brad Tolinski & Chris Gill. Michael Joseph, 2026. Hb; 387 pp with 20 b&w photos & seven illustrations; index; £30. ISBN 978–0-241-76717-7