“People love us when we’re starving,” George Benson said in 1974. “But the minute you commercialize your sound, they hate you.”
It was a hard-earned truth from a guitarist who had already lived both sides of jazz’s most enduring contradiction — artistic freedom versus survival —and who had watched that conflict take a devastating toll on his hero, Wes Montgomery.
By the mid 1970s, Benson was no longer an underdog. He had become the most acclaimed jazz guitarist of the decade so far, at least according to all-star polls and the Grammy Awards. As a member of Freddie Hubbard’s band on First Light, he shared in the album’s Grammy win for Best Jazz Performance by a Group at the 15th Annual Grammys. The following year, he was nominated again in the same category for his own album, White Rabbit.
For the 30-year-old electric guitar player, the recognition was long overdue. Benson had been recording professionally since age 10, when he made his first sides for RCA singing the R&B tunes he loved. He continued performing and recording through his teens in his hometown of Pittsburgh before joining organist Brother Jack McDuff’s band at 19 as a guitarist. Three years later, hungry for greater personal expression, he left to form his own small jazz group.
But jazz didn’t pay. To survive, Benson supplemented his income by playing rock guitar in go-go clubs—an arrangement that sharpened his versatility but underscored the gap between artistic ambition and financial reality.
Eventually, Benson found a way to bridge that divide. By merging jazz harmony and improvisation with pop structures and groove, he proved he could cook, communicate and excite without abandoning his musical identity. It was a path his idol Wes Montgomery had already traveled.
“The most modern and hippest guitarist of our time was Wes Montgomery,” Benson told Guitar Player in 1974, citing Montgomery’s “marvelous use of substitute and relative notes for the harmonic ones.”
Montgomery’s influence on Benson was unmistakable. Beyond shaping his musical outlook, it was embedded in his technique — particularly his use of octaves, a Montgomery hallmark.
Wes told me about this a week before he died. He was very unhappy and disturbed by that attitude. He died a very sad man.”
— George Benson
But Benson also absorbed the cautionary side of Montgomery’s story. When Montgomery began recording pop and rock material in a jazz context — covering songs like “Windy,” “California Dreamin’,” “Tequila,” and “Goin’ Out of My Head” — he found commercial success and financial security, but at a cost.
Jazz purists and critics turned on him, accusing him of selling out and severing him from the community that had defined his career. The backlash weighed heavily on Montgomery, who was deeply troubled by the reaction.
“Wes told me about this a week before he died,” Benson recalled. “He was very unhappy and disturbed by that attitude. He died a very sad man. The minute you’re able to make money and live normally by commercializing your sound, the fans and critics hate you.”
Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968 at just 45, at the height of his fame, celebrated by the public but alienated from much of the jazz world.
By the time Benson spoke with us, he had already begun to experience a similar hostility.
“The critics hate my records,” he said flatly. “They never think of me, or other musicians like me, as being told what to play and how to play it. Critics don’t know the circumstances of recording. They don’t go to the sources. And furthermore, they’re not musicians. They’ll review cats like Santana and Clapton and give them more credit and recognition than Pat Martino.”
To Benson, the issue was structural, not personal. The recording industry, he argued, had shifted away from nurturing artistry toward maximizing profit — a change that left musicians caught between labels and critics.
The more popular I become, the less say I have. It’s the attitude that the record company makes the star, instead of the other way around.”
— George Benson
“Years ago, producers had a double purpose in making records: to showcase the talent of an artist and to make money,” he said. “Today, they just want to make money. The artist loses his identity by playing what and how the record company wants him to play. Then the artist isn’t considered an artist anymore, just another commercial player.”
Which is why, Benson believed, “the only place an artist can be true to his art is in clubs, not on records.”
As success grows, he noted, creative freedom often shrinks. Record labels push artists to repeat what sells, discouraging risk and growth.
“The more popular I become, the less say I have,” Benson said. “It’s the attitude that the record company makes the star, instead of the other way around.”
Yet Benson was notably pragmatic about the reality of the business.
“I’m not as depressed about this as most jazz musicians,” he admitted. “I’ll pretty much record what and how they want if it’ll make both them and me money. I was told to record ‘White Rabbit’ because Jefferson Airplane had sold thousands of copies of it. To my surprise, the album was nominated for a Grammy. That shows that even when I wasn’t playing what I wanted to, my talent still came through, just like Wes’s did.”
His talent would shine again, this time on material of his choice, when Benson scored with the 1976 cuts “Breezin’” and “This Masquerade,” the Leon Russell–penned tune that became Benson’s first major hit.
“I’ve found the most unbeatable combination is Black musicians recording white people’s music — but playing it Black.”
— George Benson
Still, the situation exposed another uncomfortable truth of the era: mainstream success often depended on Black artists recording material by white performers.
“I’ve found the most unbeatable combination is Black musicians recording white people’s music — but playing it Black,” Benson said. “Wes and the Fifth Dimension are perfect examples,” he said, noting the all-Black singing group that scored numerous hits in the late 1960s and ’70s. “A Black man playing Black music will not sell as well.”
In the end, Benson insisted, the stage, not the studio, was where an artist could truly grow.
“Environment is the whole thing,” he said. “Surround yourself with music and musicians. Listen, watch, play. Expose yourself to all music and apply it to your style — rock, blues, jazz, whatever. The greatest teacher is just going out and playing.”
