Wes Montgomery

The late masterpiece that nobody could have predicted. Don Sebesky took the Lennon and McCartney song, slowed it down, and built an orchestral setting that let Wes's guitar become the voice the melody had been written for. Wes plays it with such complete internalization that you feel he wrote it. The particular tone he gets on the head statement, that warm thumb sound moving through Sebesky's slowly building arrangement, is one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz guitar history.

The album as a whole is the apex of the pop-orchestral concept: Sebesky writing his most flexible and imaginative charts, Wes playing with his fullest tone, and the selection of material striking genuine emotional chords rather than just chasing commercial fashion. "Eleanor Rigby" is devastating. Wes turns a song about loneliness into a guitar statement that is itself about something.

The commercial period's undeniable masterpiece. Proof that the Verve-A&M concept could produce something genuinely great when all the right elements aligned.

Wes died in June 1968, and this album was released after. The title track came from the Cool Hand Luke score, and Wes turns it into a meditation that feels almost valedictory in retrospect, the kind of interpretation that sounds inevitable until you realize nobody else would have found that particular angle through the chord sequence. Sebesky's charts across the A&M period are consistently excellent, and by these final sessions he and Wes had developed a genuine working rapport.

"Willow Weep for Me" is played with a restraint that achieves something close to perfection: the tone warm, the vibrato almost imperceptible, the melodic line complete in itself. You cannot listen to this record knowing what you know and hear it the same way twice. What was simply a strong follow-up to A Day in the Life becomes, after June 1968, something else. The music did not change. The context did.

Heard in sequence, this is the second-to-last thing he recorded under his own name. That knowledge is unavoidable.

The last album released in his lifetime. Road Song is the commercial format fully codified: pop material, Sebesky charts, Wes playing beautifully within the constraints of the arrangement and the brief. The material again draws from the pop landscape; the sound is polished. Without the fresh encounter of A Day in the Life or the valedictory quality of Down Here on the Ground, Road Song sounds like the working out of an already-established approach rather than a new discovery.

There are beautiful moments throughout, as there always were. Wes playing anything was still Wes playing, and the distinctive warmth of that thumb on the strings was something that no arrangement could dilute entirely. You can hear him on the slower tracks playing the melody with care, shaping each phrase, finding something in the tune that the tune itself did not advertise. That was always his gift.

Not the record to start with. Not the record to end with. But it is the last one, and that gives it a weight the music alone does not quite earn.

The sequel to Jimmy and Wes, recorded at the same 1966 sessions but held back and released posthumously. It is effectively the second half of the same date, which means the same warmth, the same groove, the same easy interplay between guitar and organ. The two men had found their footing by the time these later tracks were recorded and the results have a looseness that the opening of the original album does not quite have.

Knowing it came out after Wes died gives it a particular quality: this is the sound of two great players in a room together, not knowing it would be their last recorded collaboration, just playing. Grady Tate is again excellent; he understands both men well enough to stay out of their way when the conversation is going somewhere. The blues tracks especially have a generous, unhurried feeling that functions as a kind of gift.

Released posthumously, it carries that weight. The music itself is warm and alive. Both things are true.