Joe Beck, a jazz guitarist who collaborated with artists such as Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and James Brown, died July 22 at a Connecticut hospice after battling lung cancer. He was 62.
Beck got his start as a teenager in the 1960s playing in a jazz trio in New York. By 1968, he was working with Miles 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 told JazzGuitar Life.com last year.
He took a three-year break from music to run a dairy farm, telling Guitar Player magazine, “The New York scene just got too intense with drugs and all, so I milked cows for a couple of years. But after a while that got really old."
Beck returned to music in the 1970s, working with artists such as Gloria Gaynor and Esther Phillips, including on her hit single, “What a Difference a Day Makes." In 1975, his collaboration with saxophonist David Sanborn, “Beck and Sanborn," became a fusion hit.
