Music: Wes Montgomery

A life cut off too soon, but a wealth of amazing music to bask in, Wes Montgomery was a trailbreaker, forging the rise of Jazz and staking out his own unique style.

This has been kicking around my drafts folder for a LONG time, but a fortuitous video on Youtube reminded me that I had started this stub of a post long ago.

My introduction to Wes’ music came much later in life for me. Long after I stopped taking guitar lessons, and long after I had settled into my own style.

I initially was looking at covers of famous songs, and the recording of Wes playing the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby¹” blew me away. I bought that album, and then I went on to acquire a boxed set of his music from his era at Riverside Records.

As you no doubt can tell by this recording, Wes was an African American, and his spark to learn to play was hearing a Charlie Christian song at a dance with his wife.

At a dance with his wife, he heard a Charlie Christian record for the first time. This inspired him to pick up guitar at the age of 19 and spent a year teaching himself how to play by imitating the recordings of Christian. Although he hadn't intended to become a musician, he felt obligated to learn after buying the guitar. Montgomery received no formal instruction and couldn't read music. By the age of twenty, he was performing in clubs in Indianapolis at night, copying Christian's solos, while working during the day at a milk company. In 1948, when Lionel Hampton was on tour in Indianapolis, he was looking for a guitarist, and after hearing Montgomery play like Christian he hired him

Alas, in 1968, at the way too young age of 45, Wes Montgomery passed away from a heart attack, and the world lost an icon.

What I find fascinating about his style of play is that he uses his right thumb to articulate the notes, and this yields a soft attack of the notes that then combine to weave the tapestry of this riffs and runs.

If you dig into a lot of the African American players of guitar in the delta blues genre, you see many interesting techniques, techniques they figured out themselves, mostly being self taught. Check out the video of Robert Johnson or T-Bone Walker for some examples. Like a golf swing that makes no sense, yet still some great players have terrible form but do well, these guitarists demonstrate clearly that their techniques define them and their style. Had they formal music education, they may not have left such a mark.

As if that classic isn’t enough, here is a 24 minute recording that I found this morning (alas, the reason that I am finishing this post) of a colorized video tape that recorded a broadcast for Belgian television in 1965. Not only is the image good (have to assume that some modern pos t processing tools cleaned up the picture) but I have found that European television studios in the 1960’s took care to capture high quality audio, something that American TV from that same era sucked at doing.

Anyhow, this is also worth your time to watch. You will not begrudge this 24 minutes.

1. Frankly, his version is better than the Fab Four. Fight me about it. That album was released in 1967 and is titled simply “Wes Montgomery: Greatest Hits” worth a listen