Breezin' was the soundtrack to my honeymoon, in the summer of 1976. In those turntable days, you could leave the stacking arm for vinyl albums pulled up and back, and the needle arm would automatically lift and then return to drop back down on the same side. My wife and I were usually, um, busy, and either side one or side two was getting worn out. Nothing but good vibes associated with that record - totally. And I think I could sing you every single guitar lick: every piano lick: that music was burned into my personal hard drive long before there were burners and hard drives.

But I was a Benson fan long before the summer of '76. My first exposure to George Benson was from a high school buddy who owned 1969's "The Other Side of Abbey Road". George's sound just had that incredibly liquid feeling, the perfect combination of an agile creativity, a technical proficiency that blended with a singer's sense of phrasing, and a classic tone. He was cool.

A few years later, when I was in the jazz music program at Humber College for a brief semester, there were many guitarists there who had extensive collections of jazz guitar I'd never heard. I'd heard about it but I'd never had the opportunity to sit down and digest it. Peter Harris was my guitar teacher - he introduced me to the older, and now classic, "Cookbook" album that George did in 1966 with John Hammond as producer. This was the record that proved to me that the guy was not just cool - he was hot. He could BURN, and, in my mind, he took on the status of a master - a legend - a guitar hero.
And many years later, when I had saved up enough dough from working in jobbing bands around town to buy my first really good arch top jazz guitar, I bought myself a Guild X500, because a Guild arch top was the axe that George was carrying across the street on that "Other Side of Abbey Road" album cover, and I wanted that tone [well - sometimes, anyway]. I wanted to be a player who was so hot, he was cool.

And a few more years after that, I was earning enough dough that I was collecting guitars, and I bought myself a tobacco sunburst Ibanez George Benson guitar. I loved playing that guitar, but I didn't really have much call for it on my professional gigs, at the time. {Okay, no call whatsoever.} But that guitar was a really classy, innovative, quality instrument. Just like the dude himself.

Back in the 60's, the guitar exploded exponentially as a social phenomenon. It became a vehicle for everything from social political change to psychedelic experimentation, from two-chords-and-the-truth to technical wizardry, from Hendrix kindling to Townshend splinters, and from Louie Louie to Lenny Breau. It launched the stylistic dreams of everything from heavy metal to folk to progressive to fusion.

George Benson became one of the most important guitarists of his generation, and it was partly because he stuck to his guns, and kept delivering on a kinship to the traditional bop jazz sounds & tones, even though he was intellectually as ready to push the envelope as any fusion player, or any rock dude with his preamp on 11 and his distortion pedal set to max. He was open-minded, but also you knew he had a very strong rule book of his own that he was following. Intellectually, theoretically, the guy had old school chops.
But his contribution as a musician was going to eclipse even his prodigious guitar skills - because the guy could sing! And he could sing and play at a level that no other guitarist on the planet could touch, it was the combination of his skill set that made him a revolution. And he was smart enough to hook up with producers and record executives, and then to surround himself with musicians, who would help George capture high quality, accessible, commercial pop music that had a sophistication that no other singer/guitarist could touch. He raised the bar for every guitarist, of every style and every stripe, because he was a jazz crossover artist. He was one of the first and definitely the best, by any measure that might matter. He was breaking rules and he was challenging conventions. And over time, he has been proven to have understood the nature of the music business better than most - he wasn't selling out, he was investing, because he possessed a kind of jazz-meets R & B capital that no one else had ever dreamed of.

Imitation is a very sincere form of flattery, and nowadays every Smooth Jazz guitarist clearly has some degree of Benson-itis. But no one will ever eclipse George's contributions to music. Like Django or Jimi or Wes or Stevie Ray, his legend is guaranteed because he took the ingredients of tradition and convention, then invented his own genre, and set unique standards. For us, the inspiration that George offers is; go out and do it your own way, and give it every gift that you possess. Don't narrow down; open up, and let the music flow through you. Burn - burn so hot you're cool. That's the recipe I heard when he laid it down in his Cookbook in 1966.

Cheers -
Rik Emmett
Toronto/Jan 2005