Joe Beck, 62, Jazz Guitarist

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The New York Sun

Joe Beck, a jazz guitarist who collaborated with artists such as Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, and James Brown, died July 22 at a hospital in Woodbury, Conn. He was 62, and had battled lung cancer.

Beck was a prolific studio and session performer, arranger, and producer, with an identifiable harmonic and rhythmic sound. He was honored five times by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences as a Most Valuable Player.

Beck got his start as a teenager in the 1960s playing in a jazz trio in New York. By 1968, he was working with Davis and other top jazz stars.

“My career happened because I happened to be in the right place at the right time in a very unique time of jazz music,” Beck said in an interview last year with JazzGuitarLife.com.

After taking a three-year break from music to run a dairy farm, Beck went back to music in the 1970s, working with artists such as Gloria Gaynor and Esther Phillips, including on Phillips’s hit single “What a Difference a Day Makes.”

In 1975, his collaboration with the saxophonist David Sanborn, “Beck and Sanborn,” became a cool fusion hit.

Beck went back to farming in 1988, but was recording and touring again by 1992. In 2002, he organized the 72nd birthday celebration for the king of Thailand, who played saxophone with Beck.


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