WES MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW

Wes Montgomery Biography

The following are extracted from the sleeve notes of the 3 LP Box Set
"The Genius Of Wes Montgomery".

WES MONTGOMERY
A BIOGRAPHY
Indianapolis, capital of Indiana, is a city of half a million inhabitants. The State of Indiana is bounded by Illinois
to the west, Ohio to the east, Michigan to the north and Kentucky to the south. It is not a state known primarily
for its great gifts to jazz (although there can be few jazz musicians who have never played the tune Back
Home Again In Indiana). The inhabitants are known as "Hoosiers" and hoosiers enjoy a nation-wide
reputation for friendliness and hospitality to visitors. John Gunther, in his 1946 survey of the United States
("Inside USA", Hamish & Hamilton) found Indianapolis "an unkempt city, unswept, raw, a terrific place for
baseball and auto racing, a former pivot of the Ku-Kluxers, and in it you may see the second ugliest
monument in the world." John Leslie Montgomery was born in this city in 1925, and died there, of a heart
attack, on June 15, 1968. During the forty-three years in between he established a world-wide reputation as a
guitarist. Wes Montgomery did not turn to music until the late war years, and when it was simply a hobby.
Wes was nineteen, just married, and had heard some jazz records which he liked, including some by Charlie
Christian. "I didn't know what to think" he told Ike lsaacs (Crescendo Magazine), " I hadn't heard anything like
that. I hadn't even heard Django Reinhardt yet".
"Christian got me all messed up. I didn't play at all then - so he got me into it. I liked his sound and approach
so well that I said - I'll buy me a brand new guitar and amplifier and I can do it, because he's probably playing
on an old one. I thought all you had to do was to get an instrument, put your hands on it and it would come
out right. I didn't know about any of the fundamentals or nothing". Although Wes came from a musical family
(his elder brother Monk Montgomery plays bass while Buddy Montgomery doubles on piano and vibes) the
guitarist was largely self-taught. In fact this is almost certainly the reason for his very personal style and
sound. He told Bill Quinn of Down Beat, "I started off practising with a plectrum. I did this for about thirty days.
Then I decided to plug in my amplifier and see what I was doing, The sound was too much even for my next
door neighbours, so I took the back room in the house and began plucking the strings with the fat part of the
thumb. This was much quieter. To this technique I added the trick of playing melody line in two different
registers at the same time, the octave thing; this made the sound even quieter"
Guitar playing was still some thing of a hobby but his local reputation was spreading. In 1948 he joined Lionel
Hampton's big band and remained for two years before the constant touring proved too much for him and he
returned to his native Indianapolis. During his term of service with Hampton a number of important musicians

http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/wesbio.html (1 di 5)07/11/2005 2.37.59

WES MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW

were also in Lionel's band, including Fats Navarro, Charlie Mingus, Britt Woodman and Milt Buckner. But
much as Wes enjoyed playing with the band he had a strong sense of responsibility to his wife and family and
"The Rev" (as the band called him, due to his teetotalism) handed over to Billy Mackel. "What I wanted to do
didn't matter as much as what I had to do" explained Wes, philosophically. But if the years on the road with
Hampton were strenuous they were nothing to be compared with the work schedule that Wes set himself
back in Indianapolis. For several years he succeeded in working daily in a radio components factory from 7 a.
m. until three in the afternoon. From nine in the evening until 2 a.m. he played at a club called the Turf Bar.
When the Turf Bar closed Wes lugged amplifier and guitar across to an after hours club, the Missile Room,
where he played from 2.30 a.m. until five. Two hours later he was back at the factory bench, and another long
day stretched before him. This hectic routine was not an occasional stint; Wes kept up the three-jobs-a-day
arrangement for six years. In 1957 Wes's brothers, Buddy and Monk, were working in San Francisco with a
quartet called The Mastersounds (completed by drummer Benny Barth and pianist Richie Crabtree). The
Mastersounds had made two LPs for Dick Bock's World Pacific label in September 1957 and Bock had
agreed to record all three Montgomery brothers, plus some other local Indianapolis musicians, after the Xmas
holiday. The resultant album "The Montgomery Brothers Plus Five Others", was a turning-point in Wes' life
(the same LP also featured a nineteen-year old Freddie Hubbard, making his recording debut). Critics were
unanimous in their praise of Montgomery's guitar playing and a few months later Bock, recorded Wes again,
as group leader, then as a member of the Mastersounds unit. The Mastersounds were dissolved at the
beginning of 1960, Buddy, Monk and Wes, plus a variety of drummers, went on the road under the by-line
The Montgomery Brothers and Wes was voted New Star Guitarist in Down Beat's 1960 poll largely on the
strength of his record appearances. Apart from the albums for Bock, Wes had made two LPs under his own
name for Riverside, the first with a trio (Mel Rhyne on organ and Paul Parker on drums. both from Wes' home
town) and "The Incredible Jazz, Guitar" (with Tommy Flanagan, Percy Heath and Al Heath). The Riverside
contract came about largely as a result of Cannonball Adderley. "He opened the door for me" Wes told Bill
Quinn. "He called Riverside Records once, when he was in Indianapolis, and just raved about me to Bill
Grauer and Orrin Keepnews. Two days after Cannonball left town, I got a call from Keepnews. He had never
heard me, but on the strength of Cannonball's recommendation he guaranteed me a record date. I told him
that it was just fine with me but, for everybody's sake, I thought that he should come out and hear me once
himself just to be satisfied. He was satisfied". But one cannot live by plaudits alone. The Montgomery
Brothers finally admitted defeat in 1962 and Wes returned home. During that standstill period - it was about
nine or ten months I didn't know which direction to go. The Montgomery Brothers really wanted to make it, but
it didn't pay off for us. In March 1963 Wes came to New York to make two albums for Riverside "Boss
Guitar" (reissued as "This Is Wes Montgomery") reactivated the first trio LP instrumentation with Rhyne again
on organ but this time Jimmy Cobb on drums. Later in the year, back in Indianapolis, Wes played a gig,
lasting four weeks, at the Hubbub club with Rhyne and drummer George Brown, from Grand Rapids. Wes
enjoyed those four weeks, succeeded in finding more work for the group, and managed to keep the trio
together for over eighteen months. In 1965 he commenced a year-long partnership with pianist Wynton Kelly.
Wes, Wynton, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb appeared at night-clubs and jazz festivals all over the United
States and it was about this time that his first big band LP, "Movin' Wes", was released on Verve. He came to
London to play at the Ronnie Scott club in the spring of 1965 and his audience invariably included a high
percentage of local guitarists, fascinated by his unorthodox technique and the beauty of his playing. The
success of "Movin' Wes" was followed by "Bumpin'" then, in the early months of 1966, came the big breakthrough with his "Goin' Out Of My Head" album. Oliver Nelson directed a big band through a series of scores
featuring Montgomery ranging from Bossa Novas to Jazz tunes. The album was awarded the NARAS
"Grammy" award for the "Best Instrumental Jazz Performance of 1967" and Wes knew then that he was
reaching the widest possible audience with his musicianly blend of melody and rhythm. He never lost his
interest in playing jazz and up until the closing weeks of his life was fronting a quintet completed by his
brother Buddy on piano, brother Monk on bass, Billy Hart on drums and Alvin Bunn on conga drum. He
succeeded in keeping a sense of proportion and even when he had three of his LPs in the best-sellers lists of
"Billboard" magazine he was cautious. "When you start to make it slightly" he told Bill Quinn "everyone talks
like you're a millionaire. But let's not forget that this isn't the Beatles or somebody - nobody ever makes it that
big in jazz. I can't retire for some time yet". The last sentence was prophetic. By the time the magazine
containing Quinn's interview appeared on the bookstalls Wes was dead. He had just returned to Indianapolis
after a tour with his quintet. He left a wife, two sons and five daughters and was mourned by thousands of
jazz lovers all over the world. In his decade or so as a recording artist Wes Montgomery proved that the guitar
was still capable of development. Future jazz historians will doubtless trace a line taking in all the major
influential figures including Lonnie Johnson, Eddie Lang, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt but the end
http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/wesbio.html (2 di 5)07/11/2005 2.37.59

WES MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW

of the line for some time to come is likely to be Wes Montgomery. It is inconceivable that another talented
individualist of such magnitude will emerge for many years.
ALUN MORGAN

WES MONTGOMERY THE GUITARIST

It was a long wait. Those sixteen years between Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, years filled with a
tedium of guitarists all a'tip-toe. What was daring, new, even great in Christian, could no longer bear the
adulatory recreations of a thousand devoted admirers. Django Reinhardt, the last major pre-war jazz guitarist
still actively recording, had disappointed in his later amplified work. There were some early flashes from Les
Paul (influenced by both Christian and Reinhardt), one or two brighter moments from Barney Kessel, the little
bit we heard of Jimmy Raney, an occasional solo from Oscar Moore and some things from Jim Hall. Almost
before he had established his sound, Kenny Burrell was parodying himself. Mundell Lowe, on the other hand,
was heard too infrequently, in a jazz context, for us to ascertain if he showed more than promise. As a guitar
player I was worried by the feeling that nothing was really happening for us. I found myself listening, more and
more frequently, to such pre-war players as Teddy Bunn - an extremely under-rated performer - Lonnie
Johnson, AI Casey and of course, Charlie Christian. This was not just nostalgia, it was need. "Finger Pickin'"
got things going again and, at the same session in December 1957, Wes produced those fine solos in "Bock
to Bock" and "Billie's Bounce". The guitar was exciting once more. In tone, it seemed to be the first major shift
away from Christian. In style, Wes ranged all over the best guitarists. Genially, he pirated their ideas (and that
is, how a tradition develops) absorbed them and then adorning them with his own panache, gave them a sing
that was country-clear. And it was this 'sing' which was so striking. The startling relief, maybe, of hearing the
electric guitar sound again as though it were directly related to its acoustic parent. You could feel the steel in
the strings. You could also hear the space around each note those lovely octave runs. Shades of Reinhardt
drove; Montgomery swung. Charlie Christian's use of 'horn' phrasing had really hung everyone up. The guitar
was no longer thought of as a 'portable orchestra'. Moving with more or less frenzied decorum, 8,16 or even
32 times per bar, many an executant of the era succeeded in restricting the flexibility of the instrument yet
further. Now the guitar seemed to be heading in the, same direction as the clarinet; into oblivion. The arrival of
Wes Montgomery was a mercy to us all. Unable to read music, he worked entirely by instinct from the start.
Of course there was no reason why post-Parker developments should not be utilised in a fuller guitar sound.
But an excessive emphasis on linear development had sadly upset the all-important balance; Line, Harmony,
Texture and Rhythm. Wes Montgomery, somehow, reintegrated these. With strange little sloping harmonies,
some almost 'folksy', Wes steadily re-stocked the jazz guitarists' vocabulary.
A sense of 'orchestra' returned to the instrument. If his ear told him that a chord was right here, a phrase right
there, Wes played it. Unencumbered, dare one suggest, by too great a knowledge of the beauty which he was
creating. Everything was done with a relaxation which seemed to stem from the way in which he felt time - a
rolling 3 /4 - yet he played with the dash of a fairy tale prince. Though Montgomery may not have known what
most of his chords were called he certainly knew how they should sound. The textures of his early recordings
bear ample witness to this. There were the sessions with Harold Land, those with Pony Poindexter and, in
January 1961, there was the session which produced, "Grooveyard", "If I Should Lose You" and
"Heartstrings".
The fact that one may wish to discount much of Wes Montgomery's later work (it was aimed at a different
market), as the tone gradually lost its sparkle and the phrasing became more flaccid, cannot detract from the
quality and value of his early recordings. In any event, his peculiar sense of harmony never deserted him, nor
did the sensual pleasure with which he approached his music. If one were to judge Montgomery on the basis
of text-book knowledge, he indeed be a primitive. But his practise overrode their theory with an exultant
eclecticism, which brooked no hindrance. Wes Montgomery came up and went down in the years. He was
heard between the ages of 33 and 43. Though it is too soon for us to assess, with accuracy, the influence
which he will prove to have exerted over his contemporaries, there can be no doubt that it will have been
enormous. He was, after all, in the mainstream of jazz; ONE OF OUR HEROES. It was a long wait, and such
a short stay.

http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/wesbio.html (3 di 5)07/11/2005 2.37.59

WES MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW

ALEXIS KORNER.

THE GUITAR IN JAZZ

A fact of life in the world of jazz and dance bands during the early 1920s was the implacable twang of the
banjo. But that was a decade when musicians had to struggle to make themselves heard, a period when
drummers rattled away on temple blocks and vocalists crooned through handy-sized megaphones. A guitar
was almost inaudible in one of those pre-electric ensembles. It is true that blues guitarists had been at work
ever since the start of the century, and that guitars were even used in some early New Orleans bands. But it
was the banjo - crisp, penetrating, a kind of musical razor-blade that fitted more aptly alongside the soft
mooing of a tuba. Things altered with the arrival of the microphone and the shift from brass to string basses. A
guitarist in a jazz band could even take a solo - provided he aimed his notes at that steel-and-wire
contraption. It was surprising in fact that there were any jazz guitarists at all in those un-amplified days. Yet
two of the best flourished then - Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang. Although their duets together are among
the finest jazz recordings of the 1920's, the men could scarcely have been more unlike one another in styles
and backgrounds. Johnson, a Negro from New Orleans', was essentially a blues player yet a musician who
also found himself on record dates with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Lang, an Italian American (his
real name was Salvatore Massaro), grew up in Philadelphia and until his death in 1933 was the most sought
after New York session-man of his time. Johnson's solos were self-contained, self-propelled, their lines
elaborate yet direct. Lang sounded deceptively simple; single-strings filigree laid above highly sophisticated
harmonies. Between them, these two musicians influenced most of the jazz guitarists of the 1930s. Among
the best of these were Teddy Bunn, another brilliant single-string improviser, his solos full of wit and
elegance, and Albert Casey, hidden for too long in Fats Wailer's rumbustious little band. But the principal
innovator of the early 1930s was, paradoxically, a European Django Reinhardt. His playing reflected his gypsy
origin, a dramatic mixture of the flamboyant and the melancholy. When Reinhardt improvised a blues the
results usually sounded closer to the Camargue than to Delta country, but that was proper enough and in its
way a proof of his integrity, his originality. What Reinhardt did was to broaden the dynamic range of jazz
guitar playing, to give it a theatrical panache. But the jazz guitarist was still at the mercy of the microphone.
He only became properly autonomous at the end the 1930s. Eddie Durham had experimented with a tin
resonator on his guitar in between playing trombone with the Jimmy Lunceford band and later he got hold of
an electrically amplified instrument and seems to have been the first man to use it on record. Durham claims
that he persuaded Floyd Smith, Andy Kirk's guitarist, to get an electric amplifier, end even more significantly,
that his example influenced a young musician in Oklahoma City, Charlie Christian. This was to be the man
who gave the electrically amplified guitar its vocabulary, it's status, it's new function. And Christian did this
within the space of a couple of years, between joining Benny Goodman's orchestra in the summer of 1939
and his death in 1942.
Christian abandoned the old conception of guitar tone. He accepted the amplified sound on its own terms,
creating solos which had more in common with those of a saxophonist than the earlier species of guitarist. His
place in jazz history is a little like that of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, his playing rooted in the swing
period yet deploying harmonies in a way that foreshadowed the modern jazz innovations of a few years later.
In fact, Christian fashioned a style - virtuoso in character, based very much on single lines made up of semiquavers that virtually became the basis of modern jazz guitar playing, A few guitarists still stuck to the old task
of providing four chords to the bar; Freddie Green's work with the Count Basie band displays the craft at its
finest, but otherwise a new breed of guitar players was set loose. The guitarists of the 1940s and 1950s all
stem from Christian's example. The best men like Barney Kessel, Billy Bauer, Jimmy Raney and Tal Farlow
devised their own variants on this pattern, rather as Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and the tenor saxophonists of the
same period built their playing around Lester Young's. Some evolved extremely individual styles; Jim Hall for
example, developed a diffident, highly sensitive, quite unique way of playing and the 1950s found guitarists
from outside jazz beginning to dabble in the music. For instance the traditions of Spanish guitar playing, unamplified without a plectrum, were mingled with jazz by the remarkable Brazilian musician Laurindo Almeida,
and later by Charlie Byrd, an eclectic, able to move from Bach to jazz, from Villa Lobos to the blues. But these
tended to be peripheral activities. Nothing really seemed to be happening within the main stream of jazz guitar
playing. When it did, with the arrival of Wes Montgomery, the event seemed so exciting, so startling, that the
present writer actually inserted a brief paean, rather like a Stop Press item, inside a review of a record by a
totally different artist in "The Gramophone" for August, 1958. This praise was expanded in the March, 1959
http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/wesbio.html (4 di 5)07/11/2005 2.37.59

WES MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW

issue in a review of the first Montgomery LP to be released in Britain. "Wes Montgomery still strikes me as
potentially the finest jazz guitarist to emerge since the death of Charlie Christian", it read, "His technique is far
from perfect, but, and this seems much more important - his ideas are fresh and exciting. Jazz guitar playing,
it seems fair enough to say, has been in the doldrums ever since the 1940s. The scene only really began to
brighten about a couple of years ago when Jim Hall appeared and now Wes Montgomery has joined him.
Both men are guitarists whose solos cut really audacious patterns, who are not content just to rip out a string
of semi-quavers. Traces of Django Reinhardt, of Teddy Bunn, of Charlie Christian, even of Albert Casey, can
be discovered in Montgomery's playing, but these separate influences have become reconciled within a quite
individual and remarkably resilient style". Hindsight often turns out to be a daunting corrective, but this is an
occasion when a critic can only confirm what he felt and wrote ten years ago.
CHARLES FOX (1970)

FastCounter by LinkExchange

http://www.gould68.freeserve.co.uk/wesbio.html (5 di 5)07/11/2005 2.37.59