Meet Tal Wilkenfeld, Jeff Beck’s Young Aussie Bass Prodigy

The questions really began soon after Eric Clapton’s 2007 Crossroads Festival aired on PBS. Emails crisscrossed the world as music fans attempted to identify the impossibly young-looking woman laying down the sinewy bass lines for mercurial English guitar god Jeff Beck. She even took a memorable solo turn on Beck’s Blow by Blow classic, “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers!” Some speculated she was Beck’s daughter, while one writer insisted she couldn’t be more than 14―“Who’s that girl?”

The usual guitar and musician blogs were also soon abuzz about the fresh-faced young woman who seemed to have come out of nowhere to share the spotlight at Chicago’s Crossroads Festival with an ax legend whose previous bass players had included such notables as Stanley Clarke and Pino Palladino. Her presence was especially remarkable considering how often Beck has chosen to play in a trio format (with drummer Terry Bozzio and keyboardist Tony Hymas) in recent years, eschewing a bass player altogether. This past March Wilkenfeld’s rapidly rising public profile even prompted the readers of Bass Player magazine to vote Tal the Year’s Most Exciting New Player.

The Crossroads broadcast woefully neglected to list any individual band member credits, which only deepened the mystery surrounding the identity of the young bass wiz. Rest assured that despite her fresh schoolgirl looks, Sydney-born Tal Wilkenfeld is an adult (most bios list her birthday as circa 1986)―merely a third Jeff’s age, rather than a quarter!―yet a musician whose resume already includes working with a stylistically far-ranging roster of veterans that includes Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Steve Vai, and the Allman Brothers.

All this from a young musical prodigy who’s been playing the bass less than five years― she took up guitar at 14 in her native Sydney, before switching over to the electric bass just three years later. “I’ve always just picked up any instrument and been able to play it―I could sit down at the drums or the piano and just play for fun,” Tal says of her musical gifts. “But as soon as I started playing bass I knew it was my instrument. It was like, ‘Yes this is it. I don’t even want to play guitar anymore, this is amazing.’”