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A husband at age 18, guitarist-singer George Benson knew music as a career was a risky proposition, so he tried other jobs, becoming as handy with tools as he was with a guitar. But then a sudden realization hit him.

Photograph by: Paul Kane, Getty Images

George Benson buried the hatchet for music

Career choice paid off for versatile performer

By MARKE ANDREWS, Vancouver Sun June 23, 2010George Benson

When: Saturday, 8 p.m.

Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre

Tickets: $67 to $77 from ticketmaster.ca

A husband at age 18, guitarist-singer George Benson knew music as a career was a risky proposition, so he tried other jobs, becoming as handy with tools as he was with a guitar. But then a sudden realization hit him.

“I knew my biggest potential was in the music world, and one day I had a hatchet in my hand and I realized that if I made a mistake with that hatchet, any career I might have would be over,” says Benson by phone from his home in Pardise Valley, Ariz., on a brief break between tours. Benson performs Saturday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

It makes sense that Benson stayed with music. He began playing for money at the tender age of seven, performing numbers on a ukulele at stores and street corners in his home town of Pittsburgh. The city was known for its musicians, which included drummer Art Blakey, pianists Ahmad Jamal and Earl (Fatha) Hines, saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, and singers Billy Eckstine and Eddie Jefferson. The latter befriended Benson when the young ukulele player was in second grade.

“He had a recording, I Got the Blues, that I sang around town as a little kid with my ukulele,” says Benson. “He came to me on the street corner when I was seven and asked me to sing that song for him. I sang it and he laughed so hard he rolled on the ground.”

Benson started living the musician’s life early, making his first record at age 10, switching to guitar and playing in jazz and R&B bands during his teens, and recording his first album as bandleader at age 21. His formal musical training was minimal; he relied on his ear to learn how to play.

“I learned what I learned by listening to other artists, and hanging around great people who knew what they were doing,” says Benson. “I’m still doing the same thing, just going through different sources.”

Although he didn’t start singing on his recordings until his 1976 album Breezin’, Benson always sang, and had a particular fondness for rhythm and blues. You can hear strains of the late singer Donny Hathaway in Benson’s voice, which makes some sense when you learn that Benson and Hathaway were good friends, even though Hathaway did not have a clue that his guitar-playing buddy wanted to sing.

“We were friends toward the latter part of his life,” said Benson. “We hung out together, and wrote songs together, although nothing that came out. To be around that voice, man. He was a natural. At that time I wasn’t known as a singer even though I did sing, but he didn’t find that out until a short time before he died, when I sang On Broadway and Masquerade.”

On his most recent release, Songs and Stories (2009), Benson performs a Hathaway number, Someday We’ll All Be Free, and sings a duet with the late singer’s daughter, Lalah Hathaway.

Though he spends a good part of his year on the road touring, Benson likes to spend his time off at home, either at the Benson house in Paradise Valley, or his other place in Inglewood, N.J. In his spare time, he conducts Bible studies.

And choosing music for a career not only made for a happy individual, Benson has been successful enough to win 10 Grammy Awards, and he and his wife have raised seven sons on a musician’s income.

mandrews@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/music/Benson+buried+hatchet+music/3191036/story.html#ixzz0rp2Q5KTd

(Hollywood Bowl, 17,372 seats, $20-$150) Presented by Playboy Enterprises. Reviewed June 13, 2010.

Emcee: Bill Cosby.
Performers: George Benson, with Earl Klugh; Manhattan Transfer; Salif Keita; Tiempo Libre; Bobby Hutcherson and Cedar Walton; Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra; Esperanza Spalding; Robert Randolph and the Family Band; Cos’ of Good Music, with Ingrid Jensen, Jay Hoggard, D.D. Jackson, Mark Gross, Ron Johnson, Dwayne Burno, Ndugu Chancler; Jazz Mafia’s Brass Bows and Beats; L.A. All-District High School Band.

It’s dangerous to speculate which program of the two-day Playboy Jazz Festival will be the better one just by glancing at the lineup. Most of the time, you will be wrong. Someone might be having an off-day, one act doesn’t flow comfortably into the next, an overlooked veteran or a newcomer will suddenly get hot, the partying crowd might be distracted or drunk or obsessed with the Lakers game. Case in point: the Saturday concert outpointed Sunday’s in musical interest and energy level. Yet when the sun vanished behind the trees at the Hollywood Bowl, Sunday’s program was suddenly jolted to life by a man from Mali —  and the wave he generated rolled through the rest of the night.

It was the great band of Salif Keita — the albino Malian superstar making his Playboy Festival debut — that launched the roll with one monster groove after another, accomplished with pithy, perfectly placed notes on Western electric guitars and thundering African percussion.

Keita, 60, mostly stood stock still, radiating dignity amid the turbocharged grooves, his voice maybe not as spectacularly keening as it once was, but now often almost conversational in character.

Material from his album “La Difference” (Emarcy), like “Ekolo d’Amour,” sounded tougher and more driving live — and Keita and company found it easier to get the dancing audience to sing along than did the domestic acts on the bill. It was a shining Playboy fest moment.

Fortunately, the Manhattan Transfer, which followed Keita, wasn’t intimidated, offering up a smoking jazz-oriented set of their own — with a terrific, seasoned backup band, too. Their vocalise arrangement of Chick Corea’s “Spain” picked up on Keita’s energy — and sprinkled throughout the set were more Corea covers from their adventurous current album, “The Chick Corea Songbook” (4Q). If Chick himself, who performed Saturday, had sat in, it might have been as explosive as that now-storied set at Playboy 1982 when the Transfer joined Weather Report.

George Benson knew what to do, too. He mixed up his set a bit — starting with vocals, then reaching for the instrumentals with a fine “Mambo Inn,” and bringing out a surprise guest, guitarist Earl Klugh, for a journey back to their album “Collaboration.” The presence of Klugh kicked in something for Benson — and from that point on, his guitar went deeper and deeper into the pocket. Any guitarist would trade his rare instrument collection for just one of the incredibly funky fills that Benson pulled off in “Give Me the Night.”

Tiempo Libre, the Cuban expatriate band from Miami, inherited the dancers from Benson and skillfully kept them gyrating until the evening’s end with satisfying Afro-Cuban party grooves sometimes derived from erudite sources (as per their training) like J. S. Bach.

Oddly enough, the most anticipated performance — that of last year’s hit, Esperanza Spalding — was a bit of a letdown. There’s no doubt about her striking stage presence, versatile feminine voice, expertise on standup and electric basses, and the unusual joy and passion she radiates. But with a good but not great band and a lack of powerful material, she failed to connect with the audience in any meaningful way, her desperate attempts to generate a singalong in vain.The Jimi Hendrix of the pedal steel guitar, Robert Randolph – who was impressive in his previous Playboy appearance — was also disappointing; again, subpar material may have been to blame. The set by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and pianist Cedar Walton was somnolent, often inaudible, serving as mere dinner jazz for the crowd.

Irvin Mayfield brought his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra — which, if you looked from a distance and squinted, resembled an old photo of a New Orleans band circa 1910. But Mayfield had a more contemporary political agenda in mind, savaging BP with a wild extended piece, “Somebody Forgot to Turn the Faucet Off.” He barely missed setting off the day’s first wild crowd response, cutting off a bumpy swinging blues just as it was rolling.Regarding this year’s Cos’ of Good Music, even the wretchedly balanced sound could not quite obscure the smoothly swinging trumpet of Ingrid Jensen. But the engineers succeeded in making an almost unintelligible hash of Jazz Mafia’s performance of Adam Theis’ fascinating “Brass Bows And Beats: A Hip-Hop Symphony.” There’s a lot more to this constantly jump-cutting assembly of spare parts from every idiom imaginable than we were allowed to hear.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=story&r=VE1117942963&c=34

We are currently finalizing a summer tour throughout Europe and Africa along with a run of dates in Australia this November.  New dates can be found here.

A charismatic George Benson thrilled journalists with stories, speaking openly and with ease on his arrival at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, taking a trip down memory lane.

He described his earliest days as a musician, as a “speed-demon” guitarist, and traced how it was that he learnt to slow down.

“I see a whole new South Africa. It’s nice to see the sun shining on a lot of people’s faces here, it’s a warm feeling and a whole fresh new vibe.”

Benson was honoured with an official multi-platinum award from Universal Music for Africa for sales of more than half-a-million units and a gold award from Warner Music Gallo for the Givin’ It Up album he recorded with Al Jarreau.

“I told my manager to call Al Jarreau and let him know that something very special is going to go down in South Africa and congratulate him, so can I take that back to him? I really thank you for this award.”

With a sold-out Cape Town jazz festival, more than 16 000 jazz fanatics were due to attend the first night of the festival last night, where Benson was to play with a 28-piece orchestra in a tribute to Nat King Cole.

“(Cole) brought a lot of class to African-American musicians, at the time going through some challenges in the US. His music was some of the biggest crossover of his time, and it’s still fresh and high-class today.”

Benson is one of the few musicians who get to play on both days of the festival. One of his musical highlights, he says, was being commended by Sinatra.

“I found out he was a gigantic fan of my voice. I was like, ‘Can anybody say anything else to me now’?”

Over the course of his 50-year career, Legrand has composed more than 200 film and television scores as well as several musicals. Legrand was only 22 years old when his first album, I Love Paris, became one of the best-selling instrumental albums ever released. He is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist as well as accomplished arranger and conductor who performs with orchestras worldwide.

During the show, Legrand will conduct a 66-piece orchestra and perform with many of his superstar friends such as George Benson, Jones, Flack, Warwick, Steve Lawrence, Melissa Manchester, Neil Sedaka, Jerry Lewis, Andy Williams,  and Patti Page. The event will pay musical tribute to some of Legrand’s Academy Award-winning MGM movies including “Yentl,” “Thomas Crown Affair” and “Summer of 42.” The superstar extravaganza also will be captured on film for a made-for-TV-special to air at a later date.

Tickets priced at $150, $85 and $62.50, not including applicable service charges and taxes, go on sale Saturday, Feb. 20 at noon and will be sold at all Las Vegas Ticketmaster locations (select Smith’s Food and Drug Centers and Ritmo Latino). Ticket sales are limited to eight (8) per person. To charge by phone with a major credit card, call Ticketmaster at (800) 745-3000.   Tickets also are available for purchase at MGM Grand or Ticketmaster.

For more info click here.