`There's an unwritten law: be cool, don't get too raunchy," says George Benson. "The easiest way to involve people is by getting them tapping their feet. When they're tapping a bit they'll go your way. That's when I can float any kind of jazz line I want to into the music." Relaxing in his New Jersey home in front of a wall full of gold and platinum discs, Benson is talking about his latest album, Absolute Benson, which is already making waves. When advance cuts were aired by DJ Gilles Peterson recently at London's fashionable Bar Rumba club, the dancefloor crowds applauded the music. "Well, goddamn," laughs Benson, delighted at the news, "That's great. You know, I knew we had something when I heard the first rough mixes."
Even at 57 (he looks and acts like someone 20 years younger), Benson is still in tune with the times and as enthusiastic about music as he was 30 years ago. The singer guitarist has won eight Grammy awards and has a string of million-selling albums and megahits such as This Masquerade, Loves X Love and Turn Your Love Around to his name since his triple Grammy-winning Breezin' shot to the top of the best-selling charts in 1976.
Like the legendary Nat "King" Cole, Benson earned his early reputation as a jazz instrumentalist, but achieved stardom as a pop vocalist. Once considered one of the top guitarists in jazz, Benson's single noted solos, often in unison with his patented wordless scat singing, demonstrate the ease with which he dominates his instrument. But while his jazz virtuosity is often used for decoration on breezy pop vocals that sell in their millions, Absolute Benson emphasises instrumentals, with only three of the nine songs featuring that famous silky tenor voice. Mixing jazz with R&B and pop, Benson blends accessibility with calm, unruffled virtuosity.
Little Louis Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonsalez are his duo remix team, Masters at Work, who have shaped the sound on albums by the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Donna Summer. They got to know Benson when they produced the best selling multi-artist album Nu Yorican Soul in 1997. But it was the singer-guitarist's contribution You Can Do It Baby that turned out to be the album highlight and confirmed in the minds of Vega and Gonsalez that Benson was still as hot as ever.
It's Masters at Work's unique Latin-soul signature that makes the two key cuts from the album, In the Ghetto and El Barrio, stand out: "When I worked with Louis and Kenny I went into the studio and they let me do my thing and they put a new suit on it, their sound," explains Benson. "I went with one song in mind, Donny Hathaway's The Ghetto. And you know, you don't mess with Donny Hathaway. I knew him, we used to hang out for a while, so I approached things with great respect, his approach was down to earth, so simple yet he made it sound so different, the sign of a great artist."
It was precisely this earthy simplicity that Benson says he wanted to catch, but from today's perspective. "I knew it would be down to my personality to sell the song," he says. "Just my voice and my guitar and rhythm. And we had some great musicians." On the album, Benson is joined by a mix of big names and young lions, including Steve Gadd on drums, Joe Sample on electric piano, Christian McBride on bass and drummer Cindy Blackman.
Although Masters at Work are responsible for the first two tracks, the album represents a reunion with producer Tommy LiPuma, an association that stretches back to Benson's 1976 blockbuster Breezin' and continued through the 1980s and 1990s. When he first started out, however, Benson likes to point out, "I was a singer, first and foremost." Singing in the clubs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, guitar playing was just something that he was working on, "I couldn't play much jazz on the guitar then, I went to learn. Then someone told me organist Jack McDuff was after a guitar player."
Benson credits McDuff with giving him a perspective on the music scene: "Those two to three years I spent with him, I learned so much. He played clubs all the time, black working-class clubs, and he showed me how to pace a set, give the people what they wanted." Benson continues to hold McDuff in high esteem: "When you played with Jack McDuff you didn't have no five or six choruses to warm up on. You had one chorus, maximum two, and you'd better be hot! No messing. That was a valuable lesson in professionalism." Benson left McDuff's combo in late 1965, and was soon in demand.
He sat in with Miles Davis when the trumpeter first began thinking of moving away from acoustic jazz, and in 1971 came White Rabbit, a lush production with strings that awakened Benson to the huge commercial possibilities of attracting a crossover audience. In 1976 he signed with Warner Bros. and Breezin' became the first jazz record to achieve platinum sales. This was the point at which jazz fans gave up on Benson: "I guess it was the biggest crime I've made as far as jazz lovers go," he laughs. "They don't like to see you click with the general public."
Yet Benson is quick to assert he has never deserted jazz. He still drives his Mercedes across the Hudson to Manhattan to check out jazz clubs from Harlem to Greenwich Village: "I'm just 20 minutes away by car from Carnegie Hall here in New Jersey. I began to start checking out the jazz clubs and boy, some of the talent I saw amazed me. If some of these guys had arrived on the scene 20, 30 years ago they would be the superstars of today."
HE rues the passing of the "apprenticeship" system, where young musicians are taken under the wing of a mentor who tries to help and guide promising talent: "These young musicians, it's a shame they never got to play alongside a Dizzy Gillespie or a Sarah Vaughan or a Miles [Davis] like I was able to do. Now I find young musicians are interested in asking me what it was like playing with them, what I learned, and I'm happy to tell them. We take the opportunity of hanging out, just talking music, which is what I did with the greats when I was coming up."
At the end of the day, Benson says, mastering the guitar is down to dedication: "I play guitar all day when I have the chance, here in my studio. Music is a therapy for me, it makes me feel good when I'm down. Absolute Benson is not so much a return to my beginnings as a reflection of me today. It's a reflection of who I am, guitar player, entertainer, singer and jazz artist. It's what has made me what I am today, the things that have given me my identity. And that most certainly includes the guitar."
Absolute Benson was released this week. George Benson plays the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Sunday. BBC Radio 2 is recording the event, which will be broadcast at 8 p.m. on Monday. Stuart Nicholson's article on Miles Davis will appear at a future date
