WEEKEND IN NZ

Rip It Up, Issue 10, 1 April 1978, Page 6

WEEKEND IN NZ

Peter Thomson.

A sartorially elegant George Benson arrived in Auckland for his last New Zealand performances on the final leg of his Pacific tour. He seemed very pleased with his reception here but admitted looking forward to returning home as he missed his family. He gave cheerful and animated responses to Rip It Up’s questions as we drove from the airport to his city hotel. Did you experience any difficulties relating to an audience, much of which must regard Breezin' as your first album? “No, it’s good. I’m glad to have people who think of me as brand new. People want to associate with what's current, what's now', and so it helps me with that image.’’ Mightn’t this new audience then think you began at the top that there had been no years of development? “Well, I’ve been out playing 26 years and travelling for 16 of those, and some people are just now realising I am alive. It shows how long it’s taken to become known by ordinary everyday people who listen to radio. You must bridge many gaps to achieve that kind of popularity. I’ve been known by jazz people for years. It shows the difference between jazz and pop audiences, but we re now starting to get some more fans on our side by that I mean people whom come from a solid jazz background." Benson laughs when asked if he finds his immense popularity musically limiting or typing' him in any way. “No, because I don’t think I have any definition for what I am doing. It’s clearly a combination of jazz, rhythm and blues, pop and maybe even some other elements that haven’t been named yet. It's good for me because it keeps me from getting boxed into a corner. It gives me a greater chance of longevity in my career." Did you find the enormous popularity of the records reacting against your musician’s desire to vary a number in performance? “Yes. You have to make some kind of compromise. You have to remember this: what we try to achieve is something memorable, something worth hanging on to. We vary and improvise, but once a song becomes a classic, like “This Masquerade”, you don’t mess with that. There may be a better performance somehwere, but pepple don't want me to experiment. They want at least what they heard on the record. They deserve that. Then, after we play it we can improvise. That’s why I leave spaces in the middle of all my songs so I

can do whatever I want. I don’t want to be bored to death. We still use the jazz format, basically: melody, a lot of improvisation, not too much arrangement because we want each night to take on its own feeling. We want it to become a one-time-only occasion for everyone, so no two nights are alike. We still have that in our music. I try to change the order of songs every time. The band never knows what I'm going to play because I don’t. Once they hear one note they know, of course, but that’s as far as I go. I don’t lay out a programme, otherwise it would become very boring for us. It would become like a job." In previous years Benson had complained about being pushed around by producers in the recording studio. Does this still happen? “Yeah, it’s a shame, but it’s the business. I mean, I’d love to have that third ear, but sometimes we go into confrontation about performances. I’m very reluctant to put'in a performance that I do not believe in because I can’t ask you to buy something that I don't like. The producer will try to convince me that something is great, but if I don’t like it I'll say I just don’t want to hear it. ’ He did not have that power of veto in the early days, however. “The producer made sure I was out of town when he would mix the record, then he could always make the excuse that I wasn’t around." How do you choose your material, particularly the vocal numbers? "I always search for writers who have taste, good attitudes in their lyrics, good melody and good changes for us to play on. It doesn’t make any difference to me who the writer is. I’m not partial." The choice of material is not necessarily his own in the first instance. “There are a combination of things that the producers suggest for me to listen to, and then I select from there. I didn’t know that “This Masquerade' existed till the producer said, Hey George, you should listen to this.’ No-one can be in touch with all the great song writers in the world, and, you see, I’ve been raised to listen to another kind of writer altogether. It’s a good thing to have someone from another field giving me in-

formation about what the rest of the world listens to. "I want to do things that people can grasp. I don't want to be some genius that no-one can understand. I want to be accessible. Once I have an audience, then I got somebody to perform to. It lifts my spirits and makes me want to play. You don’t know how down' it is to play to an empty place. And I did that for years." Judging from the growing number of vocal tracks on the last three albums, and his performance at the Grammy Awards last year, there seems to be an increasing focus on George Benson the singer. “Well, the power of "This Masquerade" was so tremendous it brought me an audience that doesn't care about instrumentals, and I'm not going to let them down. I owe them. There's people in this new audience that doesn't even hear when I play instrumentals, they're waiting for the vocals. And there's people in my audience who are just the opposite who don’t wanna hear no singing; they wanna hear some playing. So you see where I'm at: caught somewhere in between, but I still have that responsiblity. “People want me to make up my mind and be a guitar player or a singer. Then they’ll have one guy to pick apart. You gotta watch it. I'm not gonna give up and fall on one side of the fence and then still be picked apart and have no place to go. It's very good that if I fail with one I still have the other. “It seems in this world that when you try to relate to the common people you suddenly become the enemy of critics. l,aon’t know what it is but I know I’m not going to let it trap me. I’ve learned not to let that kind of criticism change what I know to be correct and right for me. You dig? It's very important that you know who you are and where you're going, to pick something that you believe in and stick with it. “When I started doing what I believed in, that’s when I started being successful. Cos I used to reflect on every critcism and try to respond to it. But I found out if I went left thy d say I should’ve gone right and vice

versa. When I first started singing critics said, 'Oh no, don't sing'. Then here comes “This Masquerade". I never would've had that if I'd listened to them and I never would've been doin’ what I’m doin’ now. I never would've had the audience to play my guitar to. Lotta people didn’t know I played guitar, now they find they like guitar. “Look, I won all kinds of singing contests when I was a little kid. I had my own radio programme at eleven. I only got serious on the guitar when I was eighteen or nineteen. I played the guitar since I was nine, but it was only to back up my singing. I never tried to pluck I was no good at that because I didn’t concentrate. I only practised to learn new chords to back up my singing. Consequently, no-one in my home town cared about my guitar and when I first started going to jam sessions, after getting interested in jazz at eighteen or nineteen people hated that because they wanted me to sing, and not play my guitar. When I went on the road with the Jack McDuff group no-one outside of Pittsburg knew that I sang, so I had a much greater chance at getting my guitar over. I concentrated on the guitar for the first time. Then, some years later, I was solid top ten in the world witkj the jazz guitar. “But where do you go from there? People expect you to stay there until the next new champ comes along and then you fall into obscurity. That’s the way it is in the States everyone’s always looking for the next man. Take Mohammed Ali it doesn’t make any difference that he’s the greatest fighter that ever came along they want to get him out of there. They’re tired of him.

They'll say ‘Oh, he was a lovely guy,’ and they’ll take up a collection to bury you when you’re poor and broken. This is what people really expect! But I’m smart enough not to sit and wait. I've seen too many great guitar players before me fall into that trap. Why not be all you can be while you’re still alive, and leave some legacy, an inheritance for your children. Don’t let them remember you as the great guitar player who had to be buried by taking up a collection.” But now that you’ve reached the top as both singer and.guitarist, are there any musical ambitions still unfulfilled? “Yes, I’d like to study some classical guitar and some sight-singing. I’ve never been a good reader of music. Everything has come from experiences, trial and error, but to read music very well is instant communication. It’s only international language we have. That’s my dream.

“l feel that the guitar will eventually go towards the classical concept not to be played rigidly as classical music is, or used strictly for interpreting some-one else’s music but using that five-fingered technique that is used with the open-hole, natural-sounding guitar." Can we, perhaps, look forward to hearing Benson perform on Spanish guitar? “Oh, that'll be some time in the future because I don't believe in doing things half-way. I’ve been practising using that technique. I feel that it is going to be very popular in the next few years. I think people are getting tired of hearing that pluckin' and pickin’ and carryin’ on and bendin’ strings. They’re gonna hear the guitar played pretty like it can be. I love the guitar, man. I just don’t wanna hear it abused. I don’t like distortion and all that crazy stuff. I like clean playing. The guitar, to me, is one of the most beautiful instruments, and I like to hear it played that way." What music do you like to listen to? “The very, very best of everything. I love guitar music, but the guys who influence me don’t necessarily come from that instrument. Heifetz on the violin, Art Tatum on the piano, Charlie Parker on the saxophone: I listen to others but these are the men who really stick out. I listen to them a lot because they keep my mind thinking at the very top and if I want to go forward I don’t want to be caught up in the rubble. They help to remind me that I’ve got a long way to go." Do you find the guitar easy to play standing up? “It’s easier to sit down you can get more out of it— but unfortunately it makes for a very boring concert to see a man sitting in one spot with no movement. It’s like, you could be home listening to that on a record. The visual thing that happens on stage helps the overall enjoyment of the evening. They may miss a few subtleties because they’re looking and listening. I’ve tried it both ways hundreds of times and I know from experience the difference between a sit-down and a stand-up concert.

You communicate better standing up not just the guitar but the singing too. And I love it, man. I love to sing and I love to play. That evening, George Ben Son conveyed his love of music to two capacity audiences who roared their approval and, at the early show, gave a standing ovation. The pattern of Benson’s concerts demonstrated sharp awareness of his widelyranged popularity. Most of the material came from his three Warner Bros albums with the specific hit and vocal pieces grouped at beginning and end of the show. These provided a setting for the more extensive instrumentals at it's centre. True to his claim that no two concerts were alike, Benson varied both sequence and performance of his numbers. The early show contained more material from In Flight and a long work-out on “Take Five’’, while the second house gota sampling from two pre-Warner albums. Even some of his hits, such as “Breezin’” and “Affirmation”, were reworked which prevented simple repetition of the familiar. Yet I admit there was a brief period when my attention wandered, when the excitement began to pall. This is probably at-

tributable to the unrelieved similarity of the rhythms. Nearly everything was performed to the same funky beat. “Here Comes the Sun”, for example, began slowly with beautiful chords, a lovely vocal from Benson, but then slipped into a funky instrumental which, rhythmically, could have been a number of other songs. However, I am being churlish, or ‘picking apart’ as Benson put it earlier. The backing group consisted of the same bass and two keyboard players Benson has been recording with, plus new drummer Hugh Moran. They played very sympathetically throughout, with particularlyfine work from Jorge Dalto's piano. (He could have done with a solo spot). But it was, of course, Benson’s show and with the good looks and easy charm of a true star, he immediately won over his varied audience. Having had a number of vocal successes, Benson must be regarded as a major popular-ballad singer.He has a fine voice and if, occasionally his expression became slightly mannered, his performances were true and strong, particularly the more forward renditions such as “Lady Blue” and “Nature Boy”. He also

sang many scat duets with his guitar. Benson’s guitar playing is simply phenomenal, surely the best non-classical performance seen here for many years.) His soloing always flows very melodically and, at no matter what speed, his lines are constructed around the theme. (They are never just flashy ‘licks’. He can be unbelievably fast, jumping strings without faltering, yet remain soft and tender. And it is great to see a guitarist employ all six strings in his solos. Besides the plectrum, Benson used his thumb for soloing and played beautifully in the octave-picking manner (origi-

nally developed by Wes Montgomery.) On a number of occasions he gave extended workouts with minimal backing, demonstrating his ability to maintain both rhythm and a constant flow of ideas. Benson is undoubtedly a guitarist’s guitarist but, as he claims, he is also a musician for the people. His vocal talents may not be as obviously outstanding as his guitar playing but he nonetheless remains a first-rate entertainer. He gave two delighted audiences a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

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