American jazz guitarist George Benson plays guitar. At the age of 21, he began his professional career. He released several crossover jazz albums in the 1970s and enjoyed great success. Benson also performed as a session musician, most notably on 1975’s The Who by Numbers.
For his album Give Me the Night, he received a Grammy Award in 1987 for Best R&B Solo Vocal Performance. Benson attended Connelly High School but dropped out before receiving his diploma. Instead, he studied instrumental jazz in his youth while performing for many years with organist Jack McDuff.
In the mid-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. He then obtained a contract with CTI Records, where he produced a number of albums featuring notable jazz musicians with modest commercial success.
How old is George Benson?
George Benson is a guitarist born in the United States on March 22, 1943. He is currently 80 years old. In Pittsburgh, in the Hill District of Pennsylvania, Benson was born and raised. Benson started playing the ukulele at age 7 and was paid a few dollars at a local drugstore to do so.
At the age of 8, he began playing guitar on Friday and Saturday nights at an illegal nightclub that the authorities quickly shut down. George recorded his first song, “She Makes Me Mad”, with RCA-Victor in New York when he was 10 years old.
George Benson Career
Benson’s singing career is said to have begun 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.” When he was ten years old, a talent scout heard Benson singing in bars and on the streets.
His first album on the RCA label, the R&B song “She Makes Me Mad,” resulted from this discovery. Jazz great Eddie Jefferson, according to Benson, had an early impact on his singing. “I thought he was one of the greatest jazz singers the world has known – for me, the king of Bebop,” he told Down Beat journalist Lois Gilbert.
At seventeen, he led a five-piece R&B combo in which he played rhythm guitar, sang, and listened to records by 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.
Before leaving to found his own quartets in 1965, he toured and recorded with McDuff. He has 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.