Benise: 25 Years of Passion! (Spanish Guitar Entertainment, PBS, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

By the time I got home from the stunning Vox Humana concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 5, 2025, it was already 8:35 p.m., too late to watch the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter, and for some reason Turner Classic Movies isn’t doing the dedicated “Noir Alley” and “Silent Sunday Showcase” time slots usually hosted by Eddie Muller and Jacqueline Stewart, respectively, this month. So I looked online for something else to watch and found it in a PBS special called Benise: 25 Years of Passion! This is apparently the eighth PBS special for Benise, though I’d never heard of him before and judging from the widely disparate settings for the various songs (including Cuban music performed on a giant set representing “Club Havana” and Asian music from an equally monstrous set in China), this appeared to be a Greatest Hits compilation from all Benise’s seven previous PBS shows. So who or what is Benise? According to Wikipedia, his full name is Roni Benise (not pronounced like “Denise,” as I had assumed, but “Buh-NEE-say”), he’s 60 years old (and looks damned good for that age, even though many of the songs heard and seen tonight are from considerably older clips), he’s got a son named Bodhi, and he’s not from Spain but from Ravenna, Nebraska. Benise started out playing electric guitar, and in 1999 he moved from Nebraska to southern California to pursue a career in rock music in the manner of his idols, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Then he happened to catch a flamenco record on a local station. “I think there are times in everyone's life when everything changes,” he said. “Hearing the Spanish guitar in the car was that moment for me because the sound takes you away to an exotic place, and it was a perfect fit, especially when I was in this crossroads of my life.” So he junked his electric guitars and bought a nylon-stringed acoustic.

He started developing a style that would combine flamenco and rock, only to be turned down by most of the music-industry people he auditioned for, most of whom said things like, “Spanish guitar? Forget about it.” Instead he started busking on the streets of Los Angeles and eventually got an agreement with the owner of a club called Golleto’s who let him play there nightly, presumably for tips. That got him noticed not only by music-industry bigwigs but also by producers working for PBS, who decided he had the makings of a major crossover sensation. Benise was able to pull together enough funding to rent out theatres and present elaborate programs with other musicians and dancers, and his first PBS special, Nights of Fire!, followed the same pattern. Benise looked to PBS for a TV outlet because of their success promoting and presenting previous crossover acts like the Riverdance Irish dance troupe, singer Sarah Brightman (the former Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber), and musician Yanni. Alas, if the local San Diego a cappella vocal group Vox Humana had presented an example of how to do good musical crossovers (see my review on musicmagg at https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/04/eight-person-vox-humana-cappella-group.html), Benise’s leaden, overblown TV special 25 Years of Passion! was a cautionary tale in how not to do them. One of the arguments he said he had with would-be managers was when they asked him to downsize his shows, and judging from last night’s special he should have listened to them. Much of last night’s Benisextravanga reminded me of a review I read about 30 years ago in the Los Angeles Times from a film critic who, writing about a new action-driven blockbuster, said, “The audience was not so much entertained as bludgeoned into submission.”

Benise rammed a lot of disparate pieces of music into his “flamenco rock” approach, including such traditional Spanish or Latin tunes as Agustín Lara’s “Granada,” Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña” (which he used as background for a major production number in a bullring called “the Duel”), Consuelo Velásquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” and Latin mashups like “Running with the Bulls” and “Salsa Salsa” (one salsa was just fine for me, thank you); classlcal pieces like the opening “Adagio” from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the slow movement from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez; light-rock standards like The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”; and originals like “Galleto’s Jam” and “I Will Always Love U.” That last was not the Dolly Parton song that Whitney Houston covered as the theme from her film The Bodyguard (a rare instance of a Black artist taking a big hit away from a white one; usually it’s been the other way around!), but a Benise original dedicated to his son Bodhi. (Just why Benise and whatever wife, partner, girlfriend or female other co-conceived the kid with him decided to name him after the species of tree under which Buddha famously meditated and received his message is a mystery to me.) Benise casually mentioned that he’s just had a daughter as well, and he’s going to have to write a song for her, too. Benise also played a mashup called “AC/DC vs. Bach” (naturally I couldn’t help but wonder whether a mashup of AC/DC and Bach would produce a highway to heaven), which referenced the song “Thunderstruck” and dragged in a gospel choir, though all he had them do was chant the word “Thunder” over and over again. He also played a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” at a concert from China, which had me scratching my head given that the real-world Kashmir is on the Indian subcontinent and India and Pakistan have been fighting over it since the British quit India in 1947. (Since then I’ve looked up the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Kashmir and it says that China, which is one of the countries that borders Kashmir, has got involved in the struggle over its future, too, so Benise may have had a point about that.) And Benise closed his show with another Latin number, “Bamboleo,” which showed him at his best.

Frankly, I think I’d have liked Benise better if I’d caught him in his days as a street busker in L.A. without all the bombastic production he surrounds himself with, including flamenco dancers (one of whom was wearing tight stone-washed blue jeans that did show off a nice basket); a loud, obnoxious drummer; a plethora of various musicians, including at least two other guitar players as well as a Black bassist; at least two guest stars (his brother Pablo on “Hotel California” and guest singer Daniel Emmett on “Hallelujah,” just another voice incapable of doing justice to this overwhelming song); and all the other overdone production elements that just took away from the basic appeal of Benise’s guitar playing. What we could hear of him as a guitarist is quite good – he even manfully attempted to shred on an acoustic guitar – though I found myself resenting every time the director cut away from him the way I get with the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix, which likewise kept cutting away from what we wanted to see: what he did with his fingers to get those awesome sounds out of a guitar. (Benise’s anecdote about falling in love with the acoustic guitar after trying to make it as an electric player is just the opposite of Hendrix’s; his dad, Al Hendrix, got Jimi an acoustic guitar and he wasn’t that interested in it. Then Al got his son an electric and Jimi couldn’t stop playing it, even taking it into the bathroom and strumming it whether it was connected to an amp or not.) Overall, 25 Years of Passion! is the typical PBS pledge-break special, taking a basically talented but not “great” musician and building him or her up to look like the best thing since sliced bread.