Reviews: Performing This Week...Live At Ronnie Scotts

by: Jeff Beck






Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0826992015026
Format: Live
Label: Eagle Records (Fontana)
Manufacturer: Eagle Records (Fontana)
MPN: 20150
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Eagle Records (Fontana)
Release Date: November 24, 2008
Studio: Eagle Records (Fontana)


Rating: - Jeff Beck live at Ronnie Scotts
This is Jeff Becks live recording of his one week stand at Ronnie Scotts intimate jazz club in London. No matter how many superlatives I could come up,it would not be high enough praise for Jeff and this record. This is the same band Jeff put together for the Crossroads concerts in 2007. The band is very well rehearsed and gives Jeff the freedom to explore all possibilities in his songs. To put it bluntly, what Jeff does with the guitar should not be possible. Jeff Beck is the greatest electric guitarist who has ever lived and this record proves that statement. I can hardly wait for the companion DVD to be released in March 2009.

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Rating: - Best Guitarist
With apologies to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck is the best guitarist alive. He is an apex shredder. He bends strings with abandon. He elicits tones with the whammy bar that no one else can duplicate. His sound is original, distictive and instantly recognizable. If you enjoy this CD, I suggest that you also get JEFF BECK LIVE AT B.B. KING. Both of these represent what lead guitar playing is all about!

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Rating: - Review of Jeff Beck's Live at Ronnie Scotts
Bloody ripper album. Great to hear Jeff in full flight in a live setting and get a taste of just how subtle, nuanced, and rip-snortin' he is live without any studio smoke 'n mirrors. Mind you, he has a reputation for using minimal special effects within or without the studio. It's all in the fingers. What control. What expression. Christ this guy can play. The consumate Euro rock guitarist. So damn good, he can't seem to play in a normal rock format - i.e. with singer in tow. Of course he kinda made the transition to jazz-rock but has remained essentially in the rock camp playing what would have to be described as "instrumental rock" rather than "jazz rock". Thank god he didn't get into wanky spiritualism and paradoxalism such as afflicted the jazz rockers - e.g. "return to ... forever", "visions of the emerald ... beyond", etc, etc. Of course all these guys were in thrall to Jimminy "Cricket" Hendrix and wanted to get a taste of unleashing that kind of sonic power. Jeff might have been a bit in thrall to the Jimster himself. But Jeff was there right at the start right along with Jimminy, Eric, Green, Page, etc. He was, perhaps more than any other Euro guitarist, the main guy to create the language of rock guitar. And more than any other, he took it somewhere else. Check out Nadia for a taste of what Jeff can do with micro-tones. Great to hear some of the old material getting a workout. Only disappointment I guess is a lack of new stuff. Be good to hear some great new tunes in the hands of the maestro. Interesting to speculate on what the Stones might have sounded like had Jeff joined at the time instead of Ronnie. I don't imagine he would have stuck around forever but it would have been fun to hear a couple of Stones disks with Jeff slashing and burning along with the riff-maester.

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Rating: - Jeff Beck At His Best
The man is a treasure and here he is, still doing it better then anyone. Backed by a stellar lineup, Jeff rips through some of his best tunes from his huge catalog. With an Australian and Japanese tour planned for 2009, we can only hope we will be hearing more from him in the new year.

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Rating: - A non-negotiable five stars for this one
After Live at BB King Blues Club and Official Bootleg USA '06, two live releases from Beck that were expensive and varied in quality, it's definitely an early Christmas present to receive a new, reasonably priced, and consistently hot live set from this king of the stings.

The expected tracks are here, and the set list mixes it up enough so that even if you do own the other two live CDs, you're not getting a "re-tread" here.

Beck's post-Yardbirds success...with the possible exception of the first "Jeff Beck Group" featuring Rod Stewart and Ron Wood...has always been brighter in the realm of instrumental albums like Blow by Blow, Wired, and There and Back. On this album, he simply goes with his strengths for an unrelenting 70 minutes...and when you're Jeff Beck, those strengths result in a house full of dropped jaws. Buy it.

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