Jeff Beck gave his signature solo to a 21-year-old bassist

In 2007, at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival, Jeff Beck walked on late in a night built for guitar heroes. About four hundred guitarists had been taking solos. On "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" — a Stevie Wonder song that people remember as Beck's, because of his solo — he did not take it. He gave it to a twenty-one-year-old bassist.

In the video Tal Wilkenfeld's head is down, her hands moving on the neck, her face almost blank. When the tune ends, Beck turns and bows to her. Lex Fridman, watching it with her, asks whether she was scared. She says she was not nervous. Adrenaline before a stage is natural. Fear on the bandstand is something else: it walls you off from everyone else. If you are afraid, what are you afraid of? Making a mistake — which means you are coming at the music as a perfectionist. "You can't come at music that way, or it's not gonna be as expansive and vulnerable and true."

She read Beck's choice as generosity, not a stunt. He is not there for himself, she says; he is there for the music, and that night the musical thing to do was to give the solo away. He did not have to bow. That he did tells you the kind of player he was.

The partnership started in worse shape than the festival clip. She got food poisoning on the plane, went from the tarmac into an ambulance, spent a night in hospital, then rode three hours of winding country roads to Beck's door. He opened it and asked if she was ready to play. They went upstairs and rattled through the set. On "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" he said one word: solo. She played. He liked it and kept it. Before she joined, there was no bass solo in that band.

Fridman asks how she could still play in that condition. She says it is the ability to differentiate the body from expression. Later she uses the same split on her own shows. After three-hour gigs and one-to-three-hour soundchecks she notices fatigue in the body and in the ears. She does not want to identify with it, because then *she* is tired. Critique remains — next time this choice might serve the song better — but it no longer slides into "I suck and I am a loser."

Different styles, she says, invite different amounts of unsafety. On a recent run of Allman Brothers songs she was "standing on the edge of the cliff the entire night." If she clunks a note, so what? She would not have played half of what she played without staying out there. Pop or country sessions are another hat: play the part, groove and time and dynamics, do not veer. She has done plenty of those. They are not the same job.

Why stand on the cliff at all? "Because at the edge of the cliff is all possibilities and unknown." Otherwise she is a clown showing bedroom practice. She wants pure expression happening now, responding in real time. Anytime she is not doing that, she says, it is a waste of everybody's time. Has she ever bombed? Probably. Recovery is the skill. The more times you fall, the faster you get back, and the more ways you have to conceal the save so a listener may never know.

Fridman asks about confidence. She would rather say trust. Confidence assigns a belief: I am this thing. Trust is simply knowing you can get up there and handle what comes. She has shared stages with very confident players, and it can be a brick wall, "just like fear is a brick wall." With Beck there was no wall — trust, no fear, and aesthetic likes that lined up so that what she played to complement him, he enjoyed, and the other way around. Two open musicians with mismatched tastes can still miss each other. You need both.

At twenty-one or twenty-two, on an early Beck run, they played Montreux Jazz Festival, the room she still ranks as the coolest: Miles had played there, the speakers were the best, she had been excited for months. Drummer Vinnie Colaiuta practiced eight hours on the bus. Everyone was on fire. She played one note she hated. Onstage she let it go. Offstage she sat on a road case with a sad face while the rest of the band went out to celebrate.

Claude Nobs, who ran the festival, asked what was wrong. She said she had played a bad note — "I was such a child." He passed on things Miles Davis had told him, asked what would make her feel better, and she said caviar, as a joke. Ten minutes later he came back with a huge amount of it. She does not get depressed about performances that way anymore. Steve Gadd's line to Anthony Jackson, which Jackson passed to her, is the one she keeps: on your worst day, you are still a bad motherfucker. Jackson used to sink if he played something imperfect. Gadd said it until it stuck.

Jackson was her first mentor after she started bass at seventeen and moved to New York. The lessons were not typical. They sat in his car for hours, listened to every style, and asked what each of them heard. "That was the best form of learning." Hundreds of rounds of "what do you perceive here" train the ear and the taste. She still hardly reviews shows; she mostly notices that the body and the ears are tired.

On tour with her own band she asks everyone to sit together at least twenty minutes before the show. She does not dictate the method: no guided track, phones down, one room, then straight onstage. A couple of nights they ran out of time. She could hear it. The performances were different. Playing used to be her only door into flow; after shows she would crash. She wanted the state all the time. She says she is a lot better and still on the journey. She meditates every day, and she customizes the style to where she is in her life.

Beck died in January 2023. The grief, she says, was easier because she had already gone through a major period in 2016 and 2017 — not family death, where nothing had been left unsaid, but mentors and collaborators. Prince died suddenly in mid-2016. Leonard Cohen died in November. Gregg Allman and Tom Petty followed. She felt a piece of herself go missing, especially with Cohen, whose conversations with her sat on spirituality as much as songs. She did not want to play a note. She wanted to get rid of her things.

A friend took her to The Comedy Store. She thought it was a shop for clown suits; she had only seen *Seinfeld* on television. The comedians treated her like family in a day. She made about twenty-five close friends, put everything in storage, and rented a small room by loaning out her gear so she would have no financial or creative obligations. Previously she might have gone to a monastery. This time she hung out with comics and learned to laugh at anything — a trait she already had from a grandfather who survived the Holocaust. Two days after Beck died she was due on the road with Incubus. Green Day's Mike Dirnt showed up with a truck of old P-basses and jazz basses. She pulled an Olympic White from a case, the color of Beck's guitar, and both of them cried. Dirnt had not wanted to let that one go. The bass is now named Jeff. She played it on the Incubus tour. Grief did not get lighter; she just has tools for the road.

She first put a *Chelsea Hotel* cover on YouTube; that is when Cohen emailed and asked her over. She had lived at the Chelsea before it was torn apart, and it was one of the first things they talked about. Fridman cannot let go of the last lines: he did not love her the best, he cannot keep track of each fallen robin, he remembers her well in the Chelsea Hotel, that's all, he does not even think of her that often. The last clause breaks his heart. She asks why it has to be heartbreaking. It can also be beautiful that they had a small fling.

On the line about the unmade bed, she is blunt. It is an amazing line, one of the best in the song. Cohen's later regret, as she reads it, was not the sentence. Word got out that the song was about Janis Joplin, and he regretted the indiscretion, the privacy. He rewrote lyrics onstage for fun, the way players improvise solos. He never changed that one.

His advice on writing is the most practical thing in the interview. Look at the song first thing the next morning. Take a walk, smoke a joint, read it again. Fight with your daughter, come back, read it. Get drunk, read it. Wait a week. From every state the lens gets wider, closer to an audience. You want a thing to mean multiple things. *Hallelujah* took fifteen or twenty years and about eighty verses, cut down to four. Some of her own songs arrive whole; some become a math problem she hopes to avoid. Sondheim would not move on until lyric, melody, and chords advanced together. She lets what comes naturally come, then asks what the draft needs. They first met in a rehearsal room. She sat on a couch next to Roshi, Cohen's 105-year-old monk. He held her handshake and asked where she was. "In the handshake." He said yes. Five minutes later Cohen was on his knees feeding the monk caviar. She swears it is not a callback. It healed the Montreux sadness for good.

She has written a love song off *Taxi Driver*. Fridman hears Travis Bickle's isolation. Wilkenfeld says loneliness is a product of feeling separate from the world and from other people; the less of that separation you live in, the less lonely you are. She feels it less every year because she works at it, through meditation and scripture. In 2016 she did not feel cosmically alone so much as missing a piece she had given away. Opening yourself, she says, is a loving experience. Losing a piece of yourself is the other thing. If you are the same self as every other self, you cannot actually lose a piece.

Empty hotel rooms heal her, which is the opposite of the usual tour complaint. She sits with a suitcase, or three, and does not have to tend meaningless attachments. On a recent run they had hotels maybe once a week; she missed the space enough to meditate in the back lounge of the bus once everyone was asleep. She even joined a twelve-hour-a-day silent online retreat from that moving lounge, Zoom image bouncing, and thought: yes, this is it. Those retreats mix fifty-minute sits with talks that fold Ken Wilber's integral theory and Spiral Dynamics into Zen. She likes that self-realization has no single path — Christian, Buddhist, Vedanta, it does not matter.

Monastery life she calls the best: a tiny single bed, a sheet, a pillow, the same plain cheap food as everyone, a bell at 5 a.m., meditation until bedtime except two meals. She has stayed in Zen places, where you put your butt on the seat and wait, and in Vedanta places, where you meditate on the Upanishads more than you sit in silence. She needs both. Zen is complete uncertainty with complete discipline. Vedanta feeds the analytical part that wants to know the gross and subtle body. Sitting with yourself, she says, is the best education in facing demons. They all come out, and it is not pretty. On the other side are things too profound to narrate. Has she met most of them? She has met the ones that have come out. Who knows.

Her favorite love songs are the ones where you cannot tell whether the love is romantic, of God, of life, or just love — George Harrison's "What Is Life," Dylan's "If Not for You" as Harrison sang it. Fridman offers Eric Weinstein's darker reading of Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight": not a man admiring his wife, but a man imagining a wife already lost to his own decisions. She loves that kind of reading. A good lyric, in her terms, is a room with a high ceiling. Different people can move different furniture in.

She picked up guitar at fourteen in an academic household that capped practice at thirty minutes. So she learned to see the fretboard in her head, the way the girl in *The Queen's Gambit* sees chess on the ceiling, and she practiced all day up there. She recommends it to every musician. If you only practice with your hands, you cannot tell whether the brain has it or the motor skills do. Take the hands away. Then you know.

Inside the half hour she worked in bursts: play a couple of minutes, stop for a minute, play again. The second pass was wildly different from the first; looping without a pause was much slower. In the gap she just hung out. It felt as if the brain were saying that was enough information, let me integrate. Months before this taping she saw a clip from Andrew Huberman: after about a minute of practice, thirty to sixty seconds of rest, the brain replays the move twenty to thirty times faster, and in reverse. She had been doing a version of that as a kid. Some players do six, seven, eight hours a day. She has never practiced more than an hour, even now. That is the method, and it works.

She practices less at this point. She writes songs in her head, which is why she likes silence, empty rooms, and being alone. Melodies and lines arrive in the shower, walking, doing dishes, or when a friend or a comic says something she thumbs into her phone. Lyrics now outrun music. There is already so much music in the world; if she is going to write a song, she wants it to be about something. Words have weight.

On the instrument she will play something fast, then drop it to a crawl. Micro-movements are happening that speed conceals: the exact tone pulled from each note, the direction of the finger, where it lands, how hard the string is attacked, with what emotional intention. Slow it until you can lock into the pocket and feel every piece. When you speed up, that information is still with you. People who only play fast often lose fullness of tone because they never sat with the note. Music, she says, is not a sport. The same move applies to feeling: when emotion gets loud, people get busy and fast so they do not have to feel it. Those are the moments to slow down, be with the anger, and love it.

Fridman asks about fingerstyle versus slap. She demonstrates both and says she almost never slaps. It has a distinctive sound that does a distinctive thing to a song, and she rarely hears that need in music now. In funk it can be gorgeous. For a while it was overused. Anthony Jackson refused it outright: if you want me to slap, I will leave this gig. She is not like that. He was the sensitive one, she says; she is not.

Straight-ahead jazz usually wants upright, not electric. If she has to play jazz on electric she may palm-mute, shorten notes, and kill the resonance so it decays the way an upright does. She also has a hollow-body Harmony bass, closer to acoustic with more sustain; "Under the Sun" was recorded on it. Fridman mentions Hendrix playing a right-handed guitar flipped. She has tried flipping a guitar. It brings out something different, not only a spiritual difference. An osteopath told her that after shows she should turn the bass upside down and do the same motions the other way to even out a left shoulder that carries the weight. She took the advice.

Asked about Davie504 calling her one of the best bassists in the world, she talks about cookies. Chocolate chip is too easy; she likes macadamia with white chocolate. Fridman says the last thing you want to be in this world is easy. On rock versus jazz she finds no spiritual difference. Musically each genre has a language of dos and don'ts. A player's unique sound is the choices they make and the ones they refuse — and sometimes the things they physically cannot do. She puts the song first: melody, lyric, harmony, groove. Then she asks, inside genre X, what is typical; then how best to serve this lyric; then whether a twist from outside those bags would help. Twists for hipness annoy her. Odd meters and 11/16 riffs that do not move anybody are, in her view, a waste of chops.

Her favorite way into a session with people she adores is not to hear the demo. A demo already contains what the producer imagined every instrument doing, so part of her mind chases a known destination. She would rather hear the writer at a piano or an acoustic guitar, then go into the room on take one. About eighty percent of the time, take one has the gold — maybe a mistake, maybe someone missed the B section and you punch a chord — but the magic is there. Sometimes takes two through five get too thought-out; they eat, come back, and the first take after the break is the one.

Prince called and said he wanted to make a band with her, inspired by what she was doing with Beck: a trio. Did she like Jack DeJohnette's drumming? She did. He told her to find the drummer, audition people, send two recordings; he would pick. In the studio he would talk the form once — A like this, B maybe to G, bridge maybe to B-flat, or maybe hold off — then count 1-2-3-4 onto tape. No punching. His favorite records, he told her, were whatever happened in that moment. "Let's make a new moment in time." On "Same Page, Different Book" he had her filling between phrases, solos she did not know were coming. He liked her on the edge of the chair, falling off the cliff. That was the first time someone else held her there. Now she does it herself, because it is fun and because it is best for the music. The album was *Welcome 2 America*, cut in 2010, held eleven years, released in 2021. She says almost nobody makes records that way now. Digital cleanup has a way of flattening the thing.

Fridman hears her bass as melodic, closer to a guitar solo. She takes it as a compliment and points at Beck, who played guitar like a singer, and Wayne Shorter, who played saxophone like a singer. Every musician, she thinks, aspires to sound like a singer. Hendrix she loves as two voices fused — guitar and vocal — plus the songwriting. He beat himself up about singing. Her favorite singers do not sound like singers: Dylan, Cohen, Neil Young, Elliott Smith. She wants to believe what they are saying, not how many runs they can execute.

She is mostly self-taught, and she calls herself unbelievably blessed that her mentors — Cohen, Beck, Wayne Shorter — were already among her favorite musicians. YouTube now holds interviews she did not have when she started. Then she corrects herself: yes and no. Something can transfer in a room with a master that is not intellectual and not spoken. She has felt it and she values it. Fridman has felt a version around Olympic gold medalists: greatness occupies the space even if you do not practice that sport.

A good mentor, for her, is supportive, not the screaming teacher in *Whiplash*. Anyone truly passionate already has that person inside their head. You do not need a second copy. You need love, acceptance, guidance, support, time, advice if you ask, "just a nice open space." Her mentors never told her what to do. Why would they be invested in her destination? Only she knows where she is going. Otherwise it becomes a sport: who can run the fastest. Fridman, a jiu-jitsu black belt, likes a dictatorial coach in sport, where technical perfection is actually the point. In art, he agrees, technical perfection can be a wrong turn. She notes that he is still the one choosing how hard he gets pushed. The kid in *Whiplash* did not choose. She knows her inner critic too well; the critic used to run on overdrive, which is why she has had to work on it. Fridman tells her she seems happy, very zen. She says thanks.

Why do some songs — Springsteen is Fridman's example — make a body feel melancholy or longing? Frequency, she says. Each frequency elicits a different emotional response; that is physical, and it can be analyzed. Add the right lyric, melody, and chord and you get a very particular feeling. She does not want to analyze it in advance, because she does not want the science to steer the writing. She wants feeling to lead. Poetry is not supposed to mean one thing. The broader you leave a lyric, the more people it can reach, including the writer five years later, giggling onstage because a line just meant something new. Has she cried to a song? She has wept like a baby in a bathtub. Whose. Leonard's. His work, she says, is holy.

Advice for young people who want a life they can be proud of: tackle the demons as early as possible, through art, meditation, diaries, whatever it is. Walk toward the things that scare you. Avoid them and they expand. Does she still miss Beck? She will always miss him, and Cohen too, but she no longer feels a piece of herself missing. She gave them a piece and maybe they gave her one; she cherishes it without feeling less. You learn to appreciate impermanence — except consciousness, which she is willing to call permanent. Limited time in this body is enticing. It is a deadline, and she likes that. If she died today she would be happy with her life. She has felt that way since her early twenties. She does not want to die. If the time is up, she knows the effort, passion, and love already went into what she did. Love, depending on the tradition, is romantic or parental, or, in Vedanta, consciousness itself. Zen might say emptiness rather than fullness.

She plays two songs in the room. Fridman tries to count her off and does not know whether to start at nine or at three; they laugh. After "Under the Sun" he is undone. She tells him to try turning it to eleven, then says she cannot play something else, then does. After "Killing Me" he says there is nowhere else he would rather be, and that the private concert was an honor. She asks whether she now gets a private concert of him playing chess with himself. He says they are out of time. In the credits he leaves Maya Angelou: music was a refuge, a place to crawl between the notes and curl a back to loneliness. Wilkenfeld's whole talk is an argument that the gap between notes does not have to be lonely if you will stand on the cliff and leave the lyric wide enough for someone else to move in.