The challenge before Jeff Beck on Friday at the sold-out Cadillac Palace was to make 50-year-old music sound like the future.

The guitarist has proven up to the task in countless settings. In a career that stretches back to the ‘60s, when he came up alongside the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page as a Swinging London visionary, he has reconfigured, rewired and sometimes transcended countless melodies with his fingers. The guitarist has taken on everything from blues to classical music and made it sound utterly his own, bending entire genres to his will. 

In the first of two weekend concerts, Beck became a jukebox for his youth: the rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, R&B and surf tunes that shaped his boyhood in England and inspired him to pick up a guitar. Most of all, there was a whole lot of Les Paul, the pioneering guitarist who first pried open the door for the young Beck to the instrument’s possibilities.

When Jeff Beck first heard the music of Les Paul, it set him off on a mission to master the guitar and in the process become one of the defining instrumentalists in British rock.

Last summer, Beck paid homage to the late pioneering guitarist on what would have been Paul’s 95th birthday at a concert in New York, documented on a recent DVD and CD, “Jeff Beck’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Party (Honoring Les Paul)” (ATCO). He teamed up with Irish singer Imelda May, who channeled the vibrant vocals of Paul’s old ‘50s sidekick (and then-wife), Mary Ford. Beck also dug into some of his other early influences in rockabilly and surf music, but the primary inspiration was Paul, whose unrivaled technique, melodic songwriting and innovative production remain Beck’s golden standard.

Beck took a break from rehearsals for his forthcoming tour, which brings him to the Cadillac Palace on Friday and Saturday with May’s band, for an email interview about his inspiration.

3 stars (out of 4)

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. Beck went on to play with Paul many times, and then gathered a few friends at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club last year to pay tribute to the master after he died.

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Party” (ATCO) documents the concert, with a handful of vocalists accompanying Beck in honoring his primary influences. The performances include relatively straightforward readings of classic rockabilly (a blistering “The Train Kept A Rollin’,” “Twenty Flight Rock”), treble-soaked instrumentals (“Apache,” “Sleep Walk”) and early ‘60s pop hits (“Peter Gunn,” “Walking in the Sand”). Beck continually transcends the somewhat shopworn arrangements and vocalists with his violent eloquence, drawing a line straight back to the source of his astonishing instrumental tone.

Even better are his collaborations with Irish vocalist Imelda May on a handful of tunes popularized by Les Paul and Mary Ford. Beck dances on the strings while May swings on “How High the Moon” and the guitarist attacks “Bye Bye Blues” with percussive glee. An entire album of Beck-May collaborations would seem to be in order.

greg@gregkot.com

  
Eric Clapton performs at Crossroads Guitar Festival on Saturday. (Tribune photo by William DeShazer) View more Crossroads pictures HERE.

    In the months leading up to his Crossroads Guitar Festival on Saturday at Toyota Park in south suburban Bridgeview, Eric Clapton had been saying it would be his last.