The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery

by Fritz Byers

Wes Montgomery recorded The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (featured on a recent Jazz Spectrum Friday) for the Riverside label over two days in January 1960, his second date as a leader and the first to fully chart the new territory he was defining for the instrument. The boastful title, so at odds with Wes’s mild and modest nature, came from the producer, Orrin Keepnews, who during those years was both an incisive judge of talent and an astute marketer. (Check out the cover of the 1959 release, Everybody Digs Bill Evans.)

But in this instance, the hype was, if anything, understated. The record presented not only an obviously gifted player of taste and breadth, but a full and new conception of the instrument and how it could occupy the place of honor in a small jazz group.

The sound of Wes’s guitar on that recording is for me the first surprise, an appealing lushness that you can tell, right away, is not merely the result of amplifier settings, but something organic to Wes’s playing; to be specific, it is his thumb. He had taught himself at night in Indianapolis, and to keep from waking the neighbors he set the pick aside and struck the strings with the soft pad of his thumb. The result is a tone with the attack sanded off it, round, warm, a little dark, evoking the resonance of a human voice as much as that of a plucked string.

Then there was his use of octaves. Doubling a line an octave apart is difficult enough at a ballad's stately pace; Montgomery did it at breakneck tempos with the ease of a man humming to himself, and he made an entire melodic logic of it. And along with the octaves there were the chords – dense block voicings he moved in parallel, harmonizing his own improvised lines in real time.

And finally, the immediacy of the music itself.  Wes could not read a note and cared nothing for theory. He heard, and what he heard he played with technical prowess and a beguiling ease.

Out of these elements, Wes conceived his signature architecture, the one every guitarist since has studied: a solo that opens in single notes, rises into octaves, and crests in full chords, each stage of the improvisation enriching the texture and deepening the invention.

The album gives you all of this, and supports it with a rhythm section worthy of Wes’s conception: Tommy Flanagan at the piano, Percy Heath on bass, Percy’s brother Albert on drums. "West Coast Blues" and "Four on Six," both Montgomery originals, have been jazz standards ever since.  "D-Natural Blues" simmers alluringly, and his reading of "Gone With the Wind" is a small course in how to build a solo from next to nothing.

Five years later came Wes’s other unquestionable monument: Smokin' at the Half Note, recorded with the Wynton Kelly Trio – Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, Miles Davis's rhythm section.  The trio could push Wes as hard as he wanted to be pushed or settle sedately into a low-key groove and let him captivate all on his own.  When given this chance, Wes could do that at least as well as any soloist in the music’s history.  

You want a sample of this?  Listen to the band’s version of Tadd Dameron's composition, “If You Could See Me Now.” One of Wes’s acolytes and heirs, the guitarist Pat Metheny, has spent forty years pointing to this track. He told the New York Times in 2005 that it was his favorite solo of all time, and he has since called it, without hedging, the greatest electric guitar solo ever recorded.  Listen to it with some care and Pat’s claim stops sounding like fanboy enthusiasm and starts sounding like just the facts.

Which brings me to the melancholy I can never quite shake about Wes Montgomery. He was dead at forty-five, in June of 1968, his heart giving out in Indianapolis, only eight years after the incredible guitar announced itself. And a great deal of what came between was given over to pop confections – the orchestrated Creed Taylor sessions, the covers of "Goin' Out of My Head" and "A Day in the Life," the strings and the bland fadeouts – tunes on which Wes states the melody in those gorgeous octaves, and then, more often than not, what follows is contrived mush with no solo from Wes.

The music sold. It won Wes a Grammy. But the brilliant improviser was increasingly asked to state the tune and then step aside.  I think of this silence as the photographic negative of the records he might have made.

The ones he did make will have to suffice, and they do.  They are enough to place him with the two or three most important musicians ever to pick up the instrument, and enough to make me grieve what we lost.