★★★★★
Though he came up alongside such hardcore blues devotees as Eric Clapton and Peter Green in swinging '60s London, Jeff Beck was more beholden to the country-influenced rockabilly guitarists of the '50s and the sonic wizardry of Les Paul. Paul's technical fluidity and his use of the studio as an instrument in his intricate pop recordings with the singer Mary Ford blew a young Jeff Beck's mind...
- leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com
2011-02-21
★★★★★
Since the mid-sixties Jeff Beck has been the guitarist that most guitarists look up to. He rarely does things for purely commercial reasons and while he hasn't sold albums in the quantity of Clapton or the rest he has retained a reputation as a huge talent...
- www.music-news.com
2011-02-07
★★★★★
Beck's bandmates wrote seven of the eight instrumental tracks for this album, released a year after Blow By Blow, in 1976. Despite this, it's Beck himself who explores the rhythms and harmonies of each cut, while playing with tonal structures and bouncing ideas off of his colleagues to tremendous affect. Consequently, he's more jazz bandleader than rock guitar god, as exemplified on a cover of Charles Mingus' Goodbye Pork Pie Hat...
- www.recordcollectormag.com
2010-12-21
★★★★★
Recorded live at the famed Ronnie Scott's club in London last year, this album highlights the brilliant guitar of Jeff Beck, whose illustrious career started when he replaced Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds in 1965. The material stretches from Beck's Bolero - off his first solo album, Truth, and penned by Jimmy Page - to pieces by John McLaughlin, Stevie Wonder and Billy Cobham, and even The Beatles' A Day in the Life...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Jeff Beck's first new album in seven years hit the Billboard charts at #11, his best showing since 1975's epic Blow by Blow, which speaks to the staying power of one of rock's original and last remaining guitar heroes. The album, Emotion & Commotion, is one of Beck's best, and true to form, it has little resemblance to any of his previous releases. The album is aptly titled...
- www.crawdaddy.com
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Jeff Beck, as visionary a guitarist, in his own way, as Jimi Hendrix, certainly heads anyone's list of most exciting rock 'n' roll fretboard whizzes ever. Beck made his name as the second of three hall of fame stringbenders for the equally legendary Yardbirds (following in the shoes of Eric Clapton and preceding the pre-Zep Jimmy Page)...
- www.forcedexposure.com
2010-08-27
★★★★★
Jeff Beck's Emotion & Commotion is his first album in seven years, and it finds the recent Grammy-winning guitarist (for his version of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" on 2009's Performing This Week ... Live at Ronnie Scott's DVD) and second-time, Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame inductee once again confounding expectations...
- www.popmatters.com
2010-08-24
★★★★★
In the 60s & early 70s, Jeff Beck was considered by many to be in the Rock Guitar Pantheon with Clapton, Page and Hendrix. Even before Jimi Hendrix, Beck established himself with his volatile amalgam of electric blues, rockabilly and electronic effects (especially feedback), yet the restless and reclusive Beck yearned for other pastures to till. In the mid-70s, he moved into the not-quite-played-out-creatively zone of jazz-rock fusion (now known simply as "fusion")...
- www.jazzreview.com
2010-08-23
★★★★★
If the heroic guitar solo should disappear, these instrumental albums from the mid-'70s will enlighten future musicologists. Just what could have fostered this funky mélange of clavinettes, high hats and jabbering guitar breaks? Blame the prominence of jazz fusion (and the presence of Beatles producer George Martin) for Blow by Blow's crystalline grooves, but the epic squall of "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" and the berserk supersquawk of "Freeway Jam" spring from Beck's own twisted head...
- www.blender.com
2010-08-22
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