George Benson featured in Post article

Guitarist George Benson, who will be one of the headliners next Saturday for the truncated 2007 edition of the St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival, recently did a Q&A with Post-Dispatch pop critic Kevin Johnson that appears in today's paper. Read it online here.

It's kind of a peculiar interview, as Benson doesn't even discuss his upcoming St. Louis gig, instead offering up some fairly boring answers to tangential questions about his memories of his previous appearance at the festival, his thoughts on the public perception of St. Louis as a jazz town, and his recent CD project with Al Jarreau. It's not quite as inane as those mock interviews of rock stars that Chris Farley used to do on Saturday Night Live ("So, remember when you were in the Beatles? And you wrote songs with John Lennon?") but it's still pretty silly.

And then there's the lede, which make reference to the oft-repeated anecdote about Miles Davis once trying to hire Benson for his band, then uses the story to make a spurious comparison between the two: "Who is bigger might be relative. But Benson outshines St. Louis area native Davis in gold and platinum albums, Grammy Awards and the sheer number of big hits, including "The Greatest Love of All," "Love Ballad" and "This Masquerade.""

This is annoying, both because of the assumption that sales are the only relevant measure of success, and because it ignores the salient fact that Kind of Blue is, by most accounts, the best-selling jazz album of all time. Moreover, Benson, while a fine guitarist and singer, didn't even write any of the hits mentioned in the piece.

It's sort of like trying to make the argument that Norman Rockwell is a more significant artist that Pablo Picasso by citing the sales figures of the magazines for which Rockwell painted the covers. While Benson may lack Davis' stature as one of the all-time giants of the music, his track record as a musician is good enough to stand its own, without such dopey comparisons. He, Davis and the paper's readers all deserve a more thoughtful treatment.