Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 300 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
As a music lover, my favorite genre is probably jazz, though I am not what is considered to be a jazz “purist.” I also greatly enjoy vocalese, which is how I encountered George Benson and became a fan. It’s interesting that the jazz legend who is celebrating his 83rd birthday today was influenced by one of my favorite vocalese artists, Eddie Jefferson.Â
Musician Guide’s biography of Benson by Susan Windisch Brown details his beginnings:
George Benson straddles the pop and jazz worlds, managing to garner fans in both. Although he is well known for his warm singing voice, which is featured on many commercially successful albums, he initially drew notice in the music industry as a young and innovative jazz guitarist. After many years of recording and performing primarily pop music, he resumed playing traditional jazz in the late 1980s.
Benson’s singing career apparently began soon after he could talk: in 1947, when he was just four years old, he won a singing contest and performed on the radio as “Little Georgie Benson.” Benson sang in nightclubs and on the street, where at age ten he was heard by a talent scout. This discovery led to his first recording, the R&B song “She Makes Me Mad,” on the RCA label. Benson cites jazz great Eddie Jefferson as an early influence on his singing. He told Down Beat reporter Lois Gilbert, “I felt he was one of the greatest jazz singers the world had known–he was to me the Bebop King.” Listening to recordings of groundbreaking saxophonist Charlie Parker and guitarist Grant Green increased his interest in jazz, and at seventeen, he led a five piece R&B group, in which he played rhythm guitar and sang.
Benson’s big break came in 1961 when he joined Jack McDuff’s organ trio as an electric guitarist. He toured and recorded with McDuff until 1965, when he left to lead his own quartets. In addition to singing and playing electric guitar with his own group, he played as a sideman for such jazz masters as Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan. Benson’s first album as a leader, Benson Burner, was released in 1967. Although his singing was considered unremarkable, his brilliantly searing guitar solos were hailed as the work of a promising new jazz guitarist.
Here’s a video titled “Jack McDuff – Antibes 1964 – Feat. 21 year Old George Benson”:
Here’s “Bayou” from the album “Benson Burner.”
Richard S. Ginell continues Benson’s story for Blue Note Records:
George Benson is simply one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history, but he is also an amazingly versatile musician, and that frustrates to no end critics who would paint him into a narrow bop box. He can play in just about any style — from swing to bop to R&B to pop — with supreme taste, a beautiful rounded tone, terrific speed, a marvelous sense of logic in building solos, and, always, an unquenchable urge to swing. His inspirations may have been Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery — and he can do dead-on impressions of both — but his style is completely his own. Not only can he play lead brilliantly, he is also one of the best rhythm guitarists around, supportive to soloists and a dangerous swinger, particularly in a soul-jazz format. Yet Benson can also sing in a lush, soulful tenor with mannerisms similar to those of Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway, and it is his voice that has proved to be more marketable to the public than his guitar. Benson is the guitar-playing equivalent of Nat King Cole — a fantastic pianist whose smooth way with a pop vocal eventually eclipsed his instrumental prowess in the marketplace — but unlike Cole, Benson has been granted enough time after his fling with the pop charts to reaffirm his jazz guitar credentials, which he still does at his concerts.
[…]While the A&M and CTI albums certainly earned their keep and made Benson a guitar star in the jazz world, the mass market didn’t catch on until he began to emphasize vocals after signing with Warner Bros. in 1976. His first album for Warner Bros., Breezin’, became a Top Ten hit on the strength of its sole vocal track, “This Masquerade,” and this led to a string of hit albums in an R&B-flavored pop mode, culminating with the Quincy Jones-produced Give Me the Night. As the ’80s wore on, though, Benson’s albums became riddled with commercial formulas and inferior material, with his guitar almost entirely relegated to the background. Perhaps aware of the futility of chasing the charts (after all, “This Masquerade” was a lucky accident), Benson reversed his field late in the ’80s to record a fine album of standards, Tenderly, and another with the Basie band, his guitar now featured more prominently. His pop-flavored work also improved noticeably in the ’90s. Benson retains the ability to spring surprises on his fans and critics, like his dazzlingly idiomatic TV appearance and subsequent record date with Benny Goodman in 1975 in honor of John Hammond, and his awesome command of the moment at several Playboy Jazz Festivals in the ’80s. His latter-day recordings include the 1998 effort Standing Together, 2000’s Absolute Benson, 2001’s All Blues, and 2004’s Irreplaceable. Three songs from 2006’s Givin’ It Up, recorded with Al Jarreau, were nominated for Grammy Awards in separate categories.
Here’s “This Masquerade”:
Enjoy “George Benson – Give Me The Night”:
He has also performed some very memorable duets, including “Summer Breeze” with Al Jarreau:
Benson teamed up with Dee Dee Bridgewater in 2017 for this rendition of “Moody’s Mood For Love”:
My husband is a big Benson fan, so I’ll close with his favorite, “White Rabbit”:
Join me in the comment section below for more. Let’s wish George Benson a happy 83rd birthday!
