Tag: wesmontgomery

Exfiltration Radio: Impressions in jazz guitar

An hour exploring jazz guitar in combos and solo, from studio albums and live performances and from the 1960s to the present day.

Grant Green

I used to not appreciate jazz guitar; it too often reminded me of fusion and guitarists noodling on the boundary between jazz and rock. Obviously it’s a much broader landscape, and today we get only a small slice of it.

But what a slice! We have Jim Hall, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, and some lesser known names. Barney Kessel was active from the 1940s to the 1980s, and in addition to a few albums of tasty West Coast jazz like this he also was a member of the Wrecking Crew, appearing as a session musician on hundreds of hit singles from the 1960s. Kenny Burrell has appeared in this blog before; this is from one of his many sessions from the 1950s and 1960s (and from a record credited to him and Coleman Hawkins, though the Hawk doesn’t appear on this track.)

We’ve heard some of Wes Montgomery’s output on the blog before, but the cuts I’ve selected here come from two of the many latter-day live releases that have come out from radio shows and highlight how this man could play. One of the Grant Green cuts here comes from a similar recent release, but there’s a lot more to listen to in his back catalog. And I’ve highlighted a late Charles Mingus track from Three or Four Shades of Blues because the guitar playing from Philip Catherine and Larry Coryell is the definition of legendary.

A few more modern and soulful recordings follow. Parlor Greens is an organ trio, but the guitarist in it is the great Jimmy James, late of Delvon Lamarr’s band, and their cover of “Jolene” is here as a tribute to the late great Dolly Parton. And Grant Green’s “Afro Party” is a fat soul jazz number from the 1972 soundtrack to the film The Final Comedown, which apparently is the first soundtrack released on Blue Note.

There are, somewhat surprisingly, multiple jazz guitar covers of John Coltrane’s “Impressions” to choose from; I chose the one that was the shortest, bowing to the constraints of the hour-long radio show format, from another great Wes Montgomery live recording.

Finally, I ended the set with four acoustic numbers that felt right for a fall day. “Hüttengriffe” apparently means “hut grips,” and Wolfgang Muthspiel named it that because the chords that make up this original composition are the ones that you know by heart even as a budding guitarist, and can pick up a guitar from the wall of a rustic cabin anywhere and play them. (They also sound a lot like the opening to Lady Gaga’s “Shallow,” but I think that’s coincidence.) The great Jim Hall’s composition “Romaine” gets a gemlike solo treatment here, as does Wes Montgomery’s delicate original “Mi Cosa.” Last, we finish with an excerpt from Kenny Burrell’s gorgeous duet with John Coltrane, “Why Was I Born?”

Do not adjust your set. There is nothing wrong.

  1. On Green Dolphin Street – Barney Kessel, Ray Brown, Shelly Manne (The Poll Winners)
  2. Out Of This World – Kenny Burrell with Coleman Hawkins (Bluesy Burrell (Rudy Van Gelder Remaster))
  3. Four on Six (Live) – Wes Montgomery (The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings (Live))
  4. I Wish You Love – Grant Green (Green: Funk in France – Paris to Antibes)
  5. Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat – Charles Mingus (Three Or Four Shades Of Blues)
  6. Jolene – Parlor Greens (Emeralds)
  7. Afro Party – Grant Green (The Final Comedown (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack))
  8. Impressions – Wes Montgomery (In Paris: The Definitive ORTF Recording)
  9. Hüttengriffe – Wolfgang Muthspiel (Angular Blues)
  10. Romaine – Jim Hall (It’s Nice To Be With You (Jim Hall in Berlin))
  11. Mi Cosa – Wes Montgomery (Maximum Swing: The Unissued 1965 Half Note Recordings)
  12. Why Was I Born? – Kenny Burrell And John Coltrane (Kenny Burrell With John Coltrane)

Wes Montgomery, Road Song

Album of the Week, April 1, 2023

Though still technically under the banner of A&M Records, Creed Taylor’s CTI had already firmly established its visual identity by the late 1960s, as we saw with last week’s look at Wave. Today we explore some of the development of its sound by looking at the twelfth record in the catalog, a posthumous release from guitarist Wes Montgomery.

Montgomery had begun his career in the late 1940s with Lionel Hampton, having taught himself the guitar at night while working during the day for the milk company. When the big band gig didn’t pan out, he returned to working day jobs while forming a combo with his brothers and playing small clubs. He was discovered in 1958 by Cannonball Adderley, who recommended to Orrin Keepnews that he sign Montgomery to his Riverside Records label. Montgomery went on to record a well regarded string of albums on Riverside before leaving in 1963 for Verve to record with Creed Taylor.

Taylor saw the potential for Montgomery’s clean, melodic style to cross over into the instrumental pop market and recorded a series of albums that established him as a bankable star, beginning with Movin’ Wes and including the great Bumpin’, which featured the guitarist with one of the great over the top ‘60s pop string sections on the title track. The orchestra on this recording was arranged by Don Sebesky. We’ll hear a lot about Sebesky over the course of these reviews; for now I’ll just observe that this is the first name in this column that I first saw in a Boston Pops program.

So it was that, following a string of recordings for Verve that include some great small group sessions with Jimmy Smith and a lot of instrumental pop, Montgomery recorded several sessions for Taylor’s sub-label CTI, leading off the label’s discography with A Day in the Life and returning to Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio on May 7 and 8, 1968 to record this album. Just over a month later he was dead, having suffered a heart attack at home in Indianapolis at the age of 45. Was the final recording he made in his lifetime worthy of his legacy?

I think it kind of depends on how you look at it. A jazz session it’s not, and it’s not the best instrumental pop he ever recorded either. Sebesky’s arrangement on “Bumpin’” is so legendary that it led off a 1990s Verve compilation of “acid jazz.” The arrangements on Road Song, alas, are not quite so stunning. Montgomery’s guitar does not quite engage with the strings and horns and harpsichord(!) around him. But the band that Taylor assembled here is no group of slouches, with Herbie Hancock, drummer Grady Tate, pianist Hank Jones (that’s him on the harpsichord), and the great bassist Richard Davis joining the strings. The overall effect is pleasant enough, though it must be said that the main pleasures of the album are Montgomery’s legendary touch with the guitar and not the setting Taylor puts him in.

So far we’ve heard the more instrumental pop, almost easy listening side of the CTI label. We’ll hear a very different sound next time, one that would come to dominate the way the label was perceived—and change the course of jazz as it entered the 1970s.

You can listen to the album here: