Now Playing (Bme)

George Benson is simply one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history, but he is also an amazingly versatile musician, and that frustrates to no end critics who would paint him into a narrow bop box. He can play in just about any style - from swing to bop to R&B to pop - with supreme taste, a beautiful rounded tone, terrific speed, a marvelous sense of logic in building solos, and, always, an unquenchable urge to swing. Ten time Grammy Award winning American musician/guitarist/vocalist. This one-time child prodigy topped the Billboard 200 in 1976 with the triple-platinum album, Breezin.-With the 1976 release Breezin, his debut album for Warner Brothers, Benson began to put his vocal on tracks such as This Masquerade. Breezin topped the Pop, Jazz and R&B album charts in Billboard.- At the 19th Grammy Awards (1976) Breezin' won Best Pop Instrumental Performance for Benson and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for Al Schmitt, while "This Masquerade" won Record of the Year for producer Tommy LiPuma and Benson-Benson uses a rest-stroke picking technique similar to that of gypsy jazz players such as Django Reinhardt. -In recent years, Benson received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.