At eight years old, George Benson was clutching a guitar in an unlicensed Hill District nightclub in Pittsburgh when police raided the venue. It was just his weekend. This episode uses Benson's life to decode the mechanics of artistic reinvention: how a strict instrumental jazz guitarist became a triple platinum pop vocalist without shredding his credibility. We start with the seven-year-old playing ukulele in a drugstore, the nine-year-old recording for RCA Victor's Groove imprint as Little Georgie, and the high school dropout decision the hosts debate as either reckless or a necessary calculation given that the only real classroom for a jazz musician then was the bandstand.

That classroom was Jack McDuff's organ group, described here as an unforgiving boot camp where the guitarist must hold relentless rhythm beside a Hammond B3 playing ba ...