British guitar legend Jeff Beck has died of meningitis at the age of 78, his family announced on Wednesday evening. He rose to fame with the 1960s rock band The Yardbirds, before a long solo career.
“On behalf of his family, it is with deep sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing. After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he passed away peacefully yesterday,” according to a press release Wednesday evening on the site of the musician who won eight Grammy Awards in recognition of his virtuosity, his multiple influences and his sense of innovation at the electric guitar in almost 60 years of career.
All his peers from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page, mostly Britons of the same generation born in the 1940s, bowed to this “genius”.
Born in June 1944 near London, Jeff Beck is considered one of the best rock, hard rock, blues and even jazz guitarists, a peer of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix.
Beck also joined Jimmy Page in the rock band “The Yardbirds” in 1965, just after the departure of the equally brilliant Clapton.
The duo carved out their legend with albums and tracks Shapes of Things and Over Under Sideways Down, before Page founded Led Zeppelin. On Instagram, Jimmy Page, 79, hailed “the six-stringed warrior (who) is no longer here for us to admire the charm he was able to cast on our mortal emotions.”
Capable of moving from one style to another (rock, hard rock, blues, jazz) and constantly innovating with the sound of his instruments and his amps, he founded at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s the group of hard rock ‘The Jeff Beck Group’ with then-unknown British singer Rod Stewart, and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.
Jeff Beck then began a very long solo career where he enjoyed success in the mid-1970s with the album Blow By Blow. In the 1980s and 1990s, he played with the greatest and chained concerts: Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Roger Waters, Jon Bon Jovi…
During a 2009 jazz festival in Montreal, he admitted that it was “very difficult to put your finger on the origin of my sound.”
Rocker, bluesman, jazzman, he also said he was influenced by Les Paul, Ravi Shankar or Django Reinhardt. He is also famous for his distortion effects with his guitar, a sound experimented at the same time by “The Who” by Pete Townshend.
In 2015, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him fifth in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
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