While trying to keep cool in the ferocious heat of a record-breaking summer, I did a lot of listening to Wes Montgomery. No other jazz guitarist had quite such a relaxing way with a blocked-chord. He wasn't the first to earn fame – and, one hopes, a little fortune – playing the electric guitar in a jazz context, the likes of Charlie Christian and Jimmy Raney came before him, but he was surely the most influential: George Benson being the most obvious guitarist touched by his style; and Ronny Jordan, hip Brit of the 1990s' re-birth of the cool, being a virtual slave to his rhythm. B.B. King, no less, suggested that there was never a finer guitarist than Wes.
This clip comes from 'Jazz 625', a priceless resource of live performances recorded during the mid 1960s for the new BBC2, when it was a true channel of the arts. I captured whatever I could on video when they were shown again in the '90s just before moving to rural France and fearing that I might be devoid of culture in the middle of nowhere: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck and others. Of course, I don't need them anymore; now you can find them all on YouTube.
The guitarist and his quartet were filmed in 1965, a time when John Leslie 'Wes' Montgomery had supposedly taken the pieces of silver that Verve offered him to sell out his jazz soul by recording hummable numbers with big band backings – which garnered considerable commercial success. However, he did continue to record in a small-group context and 1965 was also the year of Smokin' At The Half Note with the Wynton Kelly trio, one of the finest live albums that a jazz guitarist ever consigned to vinyl – and Wes recorded a few. From Verve, he went to the truly middle of the road A&M label of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss for the final year of a career that was tragically truncated by a heart attack in 1968.
I didn't need to do much hunting for this video. There are other clips from the BBC2 broadcast, including a stunning version of Thelonious Monk's anthem, 'Round Midnight', the song that cast such a spell on the Baronness Pannonica de Koenigswarter that she abandoned five children and a husband back home to settle in New York and become Monk's patron. But Montgomery was equally adept at ballads (try also a lovely version of 'Here's That Rainy Day Again' with the Stan Tracey trio) and up-tempo numbers, and because he swung so effortlessly, so naturally and infectiously, I chose the title track of Full House, a fine album he made in 1962 with Wynton Kelly and saxophonist Johnny Griffin. There's another version of it available, but with a pick-up trio of Dutch jazz musicians and without the bonus of an awkward introduction by Humphrey Lyttleton and a snippet of another Montgomery staple, 'West Coast Blues'. At the risk of (justifiable) accusations of snobbery, I plumped for this one: it was his regular touring group of the time, after all; the same group with whom he recorded another splendid live album in 1965, this time in Paris. The quartet featured the rarely seen Harold 'Big Hands' Mabern on piano, long-term associate of trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist, George Coleman.
Wes Montgomery clearly had big hands, too. Those rangy digits spread across the facia of his Gibson Super 400 like some exotic tarantula. Another reason why this particular video is so fascinating is that it shows, in close-up, the extraordinary technique that he taught himself growing up as a teenager in Indianopolis (how dey do dat, for heaven's sake?). As a non-musician, I don't profess to understand unison octaves and parallel blocked chords, but you can see and hear clearly how he assimilated Django Reinhardt in his technique and the innate ability to swing that he heard in his first inspiration, Charlie Christian. What defines Montgomery's sound more than anything, though, is the use of his thumb to pluck the strings rather than a plectrum or fingernails. Chris Albertson, who writes the liner notes to my copy of the Verve Small Group Recordings, quotes a pompous English critic who concluded in some essay that his use of the thumb 'reflects a repressed racial minority's eternal quest that which will make him stand apart from his former masters.' Good grief.
The truth was much more prosaic and probably typical of this modest, genial man. Unwilling to disturb his neighbours, Wes 'started using the fat part of [his] thumb to pluck the strings. Then, to make it even quieter, [he] began the octave thing, playing the melody line in two different registers at the same time.' Mmm, sometimes the greatest discoveries happen by accident.
A commentator by the handle of Thumping Thromnambular is amazed not just by Montgomery's playing, but also by his calm demeanour. 'He's playing that like he's writing a grocery list.' Mentally rather than actually, one supposes. But yes, he comes over as so laid back you wonder whether he can right himself again. It's his sheer enjoyment of what he, Mabern, bassist Arthur Harper and drummer Jimmy Lovelace are playing that is so endearing. One of the hardest working men in show business, he must have loved his work. He started off with Lionel Hampton's swinging-est of swing bands, then returned to Indianapolis to work in a day job throughout most of the 1950s, while playing in local bars virtually every night, often in the company of his brothers Monk on bass and Buddy on vibes, latterly as the Montgomery Brothers.
Whatever the critics think of his late period, Wes Montgomery fully earned his success. Too bad and too sad that his time in the sun was so short.
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