Guitarist played with jazz greats

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 was a prolific studio and session performer, arranger and producer with an identifiable harmonic and rhythmic sound. He was honored five times by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences as a “Most Valuable Player.”

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.

He also composed and arranged for both film and television, and played with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, the Milan Philharmonic in Italy and the Paris String Ensemble in France.

Beck went back to farming in 1988 but was recording and touring again by 1992.

In 2002, he organized the 72nd birthday celebration for the king of Thailand, who played saxophone with Beck.

Beck last toured in December 2007, playing in Europe with fellow jazz guitarist John Abercrombie.

Beck was born July 29, 1945, in Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey and the San Francisco area. His parents were musically inclined, and he took piano lessons until switching to guitar.

He is survived by his wife, Marsi, and five children.