Benson comes breezin' into town

By GRAHAM REID

Don't be fooled by the new George Benson album After Hours, which has just appeared on amazon.com. It's a live album with a quartet, and Benson, elegantly dressed in black and relaxing in a Stamford Plaza stateroom, laughs when he hears about it.

"That's a bootleg I recorded in a nightclub in 1975 in Plainsfield, New Jersey. Somebody sneaked a tape recorder in and that album has been put out at least 20 times under at least 20 different names.

"It starts off with Love For Sale and then I did a jazz standard called The Masquerade is Over and people think it's This Masquerade," he says, referring to his million-selling '76 single, the first song ever to go top 10 on the US pop, soul and jazz charts.

"So don't be fooled by that album. What is on it, though, is some downright hard-core jazz - it was a fabulous afternoon. But as soon as I find out who has put it out, I got 'em. We have people who are pursuing them and we'll stay on top of that."

And Benson would be able to afford the lawyers to run the offender to earth. Despite declining record sales since his peak in the late 70s with albums Breezin' (featuring the Leon Russell-penned This Masquerade, and which won three Grammys), In Flight, Weekend in LA and Give Me the Night Benson is still a wealthy man who travels with a large entourage.

He might have inaugurated Mt Smart as a concert venue 22 years ago, playing to 25,000, and these days appear to have been downsized to halls, but everything is relative. There would be few acts who can sell out two nights at the Civic, and Benson's albums still shift in healthy numbers also.

"We sell records in the hundreds of thousands, whereas we used to sell them in the millions. Am I upset about that? Not at all, because I know a lot of artists who are great players who could only imagine selling 50,000 albums and if they did they'd be very, very happy.

"And I suspect my next recording will probably sell in the millions because now we are with producers who are aiming towards the centre of the market with today's R&B with a few jazz licks here and there to upgrade the music. Not that it needs upgrading."

Benson's smooth style and commercial success may irritate jazz purists, but his sound - somewhere between Wes Montgomery and Grant Green - has been widely copied, and has found a new young audience. It's ideal in club chillout rooms and George FM's Peter Urlich was enthusiastically lining up for an interview.

George is so cool he's hot.

He's also a well preserved, immaculately groomed 59-year-old who lives by the tenets of his Jehovah's Witness faith. He is certainly cushioned from some of the vicissitudes of life by a healthy income, but because it came later in his life - Breezin' was 22 years after his first recordings - he wasn't seduced by it. As a jazz man used to earning very little he was wary.

"The trouble with making a lot of money is you have the expectation it's going to keep coming. Anything that involves big money also involves big partners like the government who share in your success. And if you have a bad year you are having to take future money to pay off the past. So you are never going to catch up."

He has a good relationship with his former record company Warners who repackage and recycle his hits regularly. Benson was with them for 21 years and sold somewhere between 30 and 40 million albums for them, so it helps for them to be nice to him.

"There's such a thing as reasonableness and realising what the situation is and to understand what is possible. Everyone can be fighting to get to the middle, but by the time you get there the lawyers have got all the money."

There is also a freedom in having lowered expectations of album sales. In the mid-90s he did a musically rewarding stint with the Count Basie Band which, he admits, wasn't easy.

"I thought I understood the music until I went on tour with the band and realised I had missed an incredible part of jazz history, swing. So when I went to play with them, the depth of it escaped me, I was more on the surface.

"By the time we ended the tour, I began to get the message. A few years later I was invited to sit in with them in London and that time I really got it. The band were more satisfied with me as a musician too, whereas before they'd been a bit standoffish."

Today he tours with a seven-piece band whose members count time in groups led by Lionel Ritchie and Earl Klugh, and he says their musicality keeps him on his toes. Benson knows what his audience wants and delivers it. He's a smooth soul jazz singer and guitarist, whose sound is his signature.

"I'm never afraid of a musical challenge, although I know when something is out of my jurisdiction, as it were. No one should waste time or be ready to make a commitment when they start stepping out of their category. But if it's something that's possible, then I will try it.

"We play what we think the audience will enjoy and the more they let us get away with, the further we go - into nowhere land."

* George Benson plays the Civic tonight and tomorrow. Tonight is sold out.