American jazz guitarist George Benson plays guitar. At the age of 21, he started his professional career. He released several crossover jazz albums during the 1970s and enjoyed great success. Benson has also performed as a session musician, most notably on The Who by Numbers from 1975.
For his album Give Me the Night, he received a Grammy Award in 1987 for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Solo. Benson attended Connelly High School but dropped out before receiving his diploma. He instead studied straight-ahead instrumental jazz as a youngster while performing for many years with organist Jack McDuff.
Midway through the 1960s, Miles Davis hired Benson and used his guitar on “Paraphernalia” from his 1968 Columbia album Miles in the Sky. Benson then headed to Verve Records. Then he obtained a contract with CTI Records, where he produced a number of albums featuring notable jazz musicians with only modest commercial success.
How Old Is George Benson?
George Benson is a guitar player born in the United States on March 22, 1943. Currently, He’s 80 years old. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Hill District, Benson was born and raised. Benson started playing the ukulele at the age of 7 and was paid a few bucks to do so in a local drugstore.
At the age of 8, he began playing guitar on Friday and Saturday evenings at an illegal nightclub that the authorities quickly shut down. George cut his debut song, “She Makes Me Mad,” with RCA-Victor in New York when he was 10 years old.
George Benson Career
Benson’s singing career reportedly got underway as soon as he learned to speak in 1947, at the age of just four, he won a singing competition and made a radio appearance as “Little Georgie Benson.” At the age of ten, a talent scout overheard Benson singing in bars and on the street.
His debut release on the RCA label, the R&B song “She Makes Me Mad,” resulted from this finding. Jazz great Eddie Jefferson, according to Benson, had an early impact on his singing. “I felt he was one of the greatest jazz singers the world had known — to me, the Bebop King,” he said to Down Beat reporter Lois Gilbert.
At seventeen, he headed a five-piece R&B combo in which he played rhythm guitar, sang, and listened to records of pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker and guitarist Grant Green. When Benson joined Jack McDuff’s organ trio as an electric guitarist in 1961, it was his big break.
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Before leaving to start his own quartets in 1965, he toured and recorded with McDuff. He performed as a sideman for jazz greats including Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan in addition to singing and playing electric guitar with his own ensemble.