Sad, sudden news. I was lucky enough to see him live in 2009 and he was just a wizard of the guitar. He came across as a very shy modest man who was overwhelmed by the response of the crowd in the Ulster Hall (his first time ever in Belfast).
Not being a singer or especially a songwriter, he probably didn’t receive the widespread accolades of Clapton, Hendrix or Page, but he was very much the guitarist’s guitarist. In fact, I remember the Observer newspaper used to have an experts’ expert column every week, where they’d ask experts in a given field who their favourite of their craft was. They did guitarists one week and almost all of them (it included Gary Moore, Phil Collen and others) opted for Jeff.