Earworms: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat by Jeff Beck

We lost a major life force

Lester Young was one of the greatest tenor saxophone players of all time. If you could somehow combine Young and Coleman Hawkins into one person, and speed it all up, you might have been able to invent bebop before it happened. Young always wore a pork pie hat. When he died in 1959 at only age 50, the brilliant Charles Mingus composed an elegy, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” to acknowledge the man and his music.

Seventeen years later, rock guitarist Jeff Beck made a jazz fusion album, Wired, which a few years after that became the first record I ever owned by him. (I had actually seen Beck perform with the Jan Hammer Group at my very first concert, the Superjam show at Busch Stadium in 1976.) The tunes for this album were composed by Hammer, who played synthesizer; Max Middleton, who played clavinet and electric piano, and Narada Michael Walden, who played drums. In addition, Beck decided to play Mingus’s tribute to Young as a change of pace from the preponderance of fiery funk and heavier numbers.

When I got the news that Jeff Beck died – as you do, nowadays, somebody posted a tribute on Facebook, and suddenly that feed was filled with reminiscences, dedications, videos, photos, and declarations of Beck’s genius – this was the first song I wanted to hear. There were plenty of others that came to mind – “Over Under Sideways Down” from his Yardbirds days, “I Ain’t Superstitious” from his time with Rod Stewart singing in his band, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” featuring Beck’s brilliant guitar, “People Get Ready” from his reunion with Stewart in the late 80s, and any number of albums from the last 20 years, all of which (save the last one) got way less attention than they deserved. But it was the sadness mixed with celebration that Beck captured so perfectly in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” that I needed.

Starting with just his fingers on the guitar, playing that opening phrase slowly and eloquently, before the cymbals of Richard Bailey (drummer on this track subbing for Walden) start shimmering behind him, and the electric piano comes in to add further support, Beck pours his soul into the timeless blues melody Mingus composed. Beck was a master technician, possibly the greatest at playing complex passages and getting the Stratocaster guitar to make sounds nobody else could even imagine. But he was also enormously human, always delivering emotional power into his playing.

After the opening melodic statement, the band shifts into a steady bluesy backing, filled with musical choices that are capable of astonishing listeners all by themselves if they weren’t also so indelibly connected to what Beck is playing. And his solo over a few choruses is beautiful, filled with compassion, with strength, with joy, with surprise, with tenderness and playfulness and imagination.

This version of the tune is taken at a slightly faster tempo from Mingus’s original on the classic Mingus Ah Um (which was the first jazz album I ever owned, and one I had played dozens of times in the year between acquiring it and discovering Beck’s album). The playing by Mingus’s group, particularly the tenor sax solo by Booker Ervin, is possibly too close to Young’s passing to contain so many emotions. It’s powerful, to be sure, and it never fails to make me feel the love they brought to the performance. But somehow, Beck, who certainly never knew Young personally and quite probably knew the Mingus tune better than he knew Young’s playing, imbues the tune with a life force beyond sorrow. That’s the sort of thing he did again and again throughout the nearly 58 years of his career.

By all accounts, Jeff Beck grew bored easily, and was just as happy working on his racing cars in the garage as he was forcing jaws to drop in audiences around the world. He never played the same kind of music, or even with the same musicians, for very long. There was always something new he hadn’t done, some sound he had to invent, some tribute to an early influence he needed to get out. I, on the other hand, never got bored the records I’ve heard by Beck (which is most, but not all of them), and the two times I saw him live remain vivid memories of musical excitement and creativity.

In case you’ve never heard the original, here’s Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”