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?”
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.’”
