The George Benson Answer: Do You Need Jazz to Play Modern R&B Guitar
Yes — because modern R&B guitar is jazz, one generation removed. The vocabulary of today's hippest young players traces almost entirely back to George Benson: the fills, the double-stops, the gliding lines between vocal phrases — Benson recorded all of it decades ago. That's the case Junewon Choi, the Berklee-trained guitarist behind VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, made in a recent live Q&A, and it's why his online jazz guitar lessons treat jazz not as a genre choice but as the source code underneath the music you already love.
Where does the modern R&B guitar sound actually come from?
Listen to the guitarists shaping R&B and neo-soul right now — many of them young Black players who grew up closer to hip-hop than to jazz clubs — and then put on Benson's Breezin' or his take on Sunny. It's all there. The style feels new because the grooves are new; the lines themselves are inherited. As Junewon puts it: they call it R&B, but what they're playing is jazz. And that migration makes historical sense — over the last few decades, much of Black American music's creative center moved into hip-hop and R&B, and the players carried the vocabulary with them. The clothes changed; the language didn't.
What did Tom Misch sample from jazz?
Tom Misch — one of the most-loved guitarists among younger listeners — built his early reputation on Beat Tape 1, and one of its tracks samples George Benson's intro to Stella by Starlight. Sit with that: a lo-fi hip-hop landmark is literally built on a jazz standard's intro. The traffic runs the other direction too. When Blue Note assembled a Prince tribute project, the guitar chair went to Peter Bernstein — a straight-ahead jazz player — and he sat inside those grooves effortlessly. Jazz musicians move into groove music all the time; the reverse trip is much harder. That asymmetry tells you which skill set is the superset.
What's the right order — groove first, or jazz first?
Jazz first, groove second. The R&B groove is sparse, relaxed, harmonically simple on paper — but what the great players put into that space is anything but simple. They are never just sitting inside one chord. Junewon's thought experiment: imagine Stevie Ray Vaughan alive today, playing his own style, but slipping in Benson's harmonic side-steps — those outside lines and dominant motions that resolve like magic. That's essentially what modern R&B guitar is. So the path is:
Absorb the jazz layer first — bebop vocabulary, chord motion, resolution
Then strip it back into the spare, unhurried R&B pocket
Never mistake simple changes for simple playing
Which master should you study for which strength?
One of the most useful things a teacher can tell you is who owns what. Junewon's shorthand map:
George Benson — harmonic forward motion; lines that never sit still, always traveling somewhere
Grant Green — feel, pure and undiluted; when everything else is right but the feel is missing, study Grant
Peter Bernstein — melodies so complete they're dangerous: borrow one phrase and you're trapped in his line, and everyone can hear whose it is
Jesse van Ruller — the rare player fluent in both modern and traditional languages
Russell Malone — bebop lines and swing feel in their classic form
No one gets all of it. The masters didn't either.
Who makes melodies that touch the heart?
When Pat Metheny was asked about melody that moves people, his advice to younger players was simple: listen to Wes Montgomery — praise he attached publicly to Smokin' at the Half Note. Advanced harmony, delivered so simply it sounds inevitable: that was Wes's magic trick, and it's still the deepest well to draw from. If that's the sound you're chasing, Wes' Insight breaks his fretboard logic down into lessons. But the weekend takeaway is bigger than any one hero: your sound is inherited — a theme we explored in Your Sound Is Inherited: A Reflection on Lineage — and then it's yours to aim. Copy the masters, then honestly ask what you do best: melody, motion, feel, or modern color, the way Benson's own right hand became a study in itself (see Mastering the George Benson Rest Stroke). And if you're ready to start building the jazz layer under your R&B, Building Blocks is the entry point.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up