George Benson Will Be Breezin’ At The Montreal International Jazz Festival

told my engineer, ‘Turn it up man. I want to feel it live with the band.’ I reached over and turned the knob up myself and I knew exactly what to do then because I put myself in the band and played it as if we were all live. I think that’s what worked.”

A former child prodigy whose earliest musical memory was hearing holiday music in a local Pittsburgh department store when his mom took him Christmas shopping when he was around five, Benson picked up a ukulele when he was about seven before switching to guitar the following year. By the age of 21 he was a hired hand in jazz organist Jack McDuff’s band before recording 1964’s The New Boss Guitar, Benson’s debut as a leader. And while he always had a foot in both the pop and jazz camps, it wasn’t until 1976’s Breezin’ where he had a commercial breakthrough. Benson’s fifteenth studio outing topped the jazz, pop and R&B charts, was certified triple platinum and became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. And while hard-core jazzbos might sniff at Benson allegedly selling out, he has no regrets and is happy to indulge his fans when he hits the stage.

“I learned a long time ago that if you don’t want to play hits, don’t record them, because you’re going to have to play them,” he said with a laugh. “I remember the years when we didn’t have any hits, we were playing to very small audiences in nightclubs. There’s a great difference. When I saw my friends like Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith and some others that had hits in one case, the place where you had musicians say they weren’t going to play one hit or another ever