Wes Montgomery

Before Riverside, before Orrin Keepnews, before the rest of the country caught on, there was this. A Pacific Jazz session from 1957 with the three Montgomery brothers and a crew of Indianapolis players whose names got quietly dropped from the album title. Wes sounds exploratory here, his lines loose and searching, not yet carrying the full weight of what he would become. Buddy anchors the front line on vibes with a light touch, Monk keeps the bottom warm and central.

It is a blowing date, essentially. Nobody is trying to make a statement. The five others are treated as background scenery and the music reflects that, efficient and professional without being remarkable. But there are moments, especially on the slower material, where Wes opens up and you hear the voice that would eventually stop everyone cold. The future is already in there if you know where to look.

Worth hearing as a document of where it began. Not where you start.

Compiled from the same December 1957 Indianapolis session as the Montgomery Brothers and Five Others, plus three tracks from a Los Angeles date in April 1958. The title tells you everything about what matters here: Wes in his natural habitat, his thumb-picking technique already fully formed. This is really a Montgomery family affair again, with Buddy and Monk alongside the guitarist, though the Indianapolis tracks also feature a young Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and two local tenor saxophonists, Alonzo Johnson and Wayman Atkinson.

Wes's thumb-picking technique is fully in evidence. He does not use a plectrum. The flesh of his thumb produces a warmth that no pick can match, a rounded tone that sits deep in the mix without ever crowding it. The blues feel runs through everything. Even the ballads swing low. Joe Bradley keeps the piano comping simple and supportive, leaving the space that Wes needed to stretch. This is a record about what one man can do with six strings and a right thumb.

A strong early document of the Indianapolis jazz scene, and notable as one of the first recordings of Freddie Hubbard, who was nineteen at the time.

Orrin Keepnews heard about Wes through Cannonball Adderley and flew to Indianapolis to hear him at the Missile Room, then brought him to New York to record. This is what he found. The organ trio format with Mel Rhyne gives Wes room to stretch without needing a full rhythm section: Rhyne holds the bottom with his left hand and comps with his right, leaving the harmonic space open and clean for the guitar to move through freely.

"Missile Blues", named for the Indianapolis club where Keepnews first heard him, is twelve bars of gospel and gut, Wes digging in like he has been waiting years for someone to press record. And he had been. He was thirty-four years old by the birth year Riverside always printed, 1925, and thirty-six by the 1923 date now generally accepted. That is old to be making your first album under your own name, and there is a corresponding urgency to the playing, nothing wasted, every phrase landing with the intention of someone who knows the clock has been running a while.

The organ trio is Wes's most natural small-group setting. Rhyne understood the assignment from the first session.

The album that changed everything. Tommy Flanagan is the ideal piano voice here: precise and lyrical, never overplaying, giving Wes the harmonic foundation to do whatever he wants. And what he wants to do is show you three things: his single-note lines, fluid and long; his octave technique, which he effectively invented at this level and which no guitarist has since matched; and his block chords, which he saves for the end of solos like pulling out a trump card you did not know he held.

"Four on Six" became a jazz standard because of this record. "West Coast Blues" became required listening. The whole album became the benchmark for every jazz guitarist who came after. Every one of them knows it. Some have spent careers trying to understand how he made the octaves sound so inevitable, the two-string voicing carrying melody and bass simultaneously at a tempo that would give most players pause.

Start here. If you have never heard Wes Montgomery, start here. If you have, you know why.

The first Riverside album where Wes fronts a quintet with a horn player, and James Clay is exactly the right choice. Clay's tenor is warm and deliberate, not pushing or crowding, and his flute playing adds a different color entirely: he and Wes share the front line without competing for space, which takes genuine generosity from both parties. Victor Feldman's piano is supportive and tasteful throughout, never overplaying against the guitar.

The material is mostly jazz tunes and standards, with two Wes originals in the title track and So Do It!, and you can hear him starting to think about structure: about how a solo builds over a full side, not just a chorus, about where to save the octave runs for maximum effect. The title track has a rolling, road-trip quality that earns its name. This is Wes thinking as a bandleader, not just an instrumentalist.

An underrated record in the Riverside catalog. The quintet format suited him, and he came back to it on Full House with Johnny Griffin in 1962.

Recorded in San Francisco for Fantasy, this is the cleanest document of how the three brothers played together as a quartet. Buddy is on piano throughout, and the combination with Wes's guitar opens up harmonic space that the vibraphone dates sometimes crowd. Lawrence Marable swings cleanly underneath, never overplaying, giving the brothers room to stretch and interact.

Monk held everything down with a bass tone that was warm and central without being intrusive, and Marable kept the rhythm section from ever crowding the front line. The material is mostly standards and originals. Wes sounds relaxed and inventive, already building on the vocabulary that The Incredible Jazz Guitar had established. This is a family record in the best sense: three people who grew up together and sound like it.

A warmer and more cohesive record than the Five Others debut. The brothers finally get the full showcase they deserved.

Recorded at The Cellar in Vancouver, and the informal setting loosens everyone up. The brothers play longer, take more chances, stretch the heads out further than they do on their studio dates. Wes especially opens up on the longer pieces, building solos with a patience and architectural clarity you do not always hear on the studio records. Buddy’s vibraphone is particularly expressive in this acoustic setting, the mallets ringing out with more natural decay.

Paul Humphrey is a different kind of drummer than the brothers were used to, a Detroit-born session drummer then working out of New York, who would later move to Los Angeles and into R&B as well as jazz. His touch is precise and adaptable, and the combination loosens the group up in ways you do not hear on the studio records. Fantasy released it with clean, direct sound: exactly what you need for a live guitar-and-vibes record.

A good document of the brothers on the road. The informal energy is the point.

The Montgomery Brothers on Riverside, which gives the recording a richer, more detailed sound than the Fantasy dates. Recorded in New York in January 1961, "Groove Yard" is the essential track, a Carl Perkins tune that became one of the brothers’ signature pieces. The tempo is medium-up, the groove locked in from the first bar, and the tune has the kind of melodic simplicity that makes it easy to follow and endlessly interesting to develop.

Wes plays with characteristic composure, stating the melody cleanly and then departing from it in ways that feel both inevitable and surprising. Buddy is on piano rather than vibes for the whole date, and the combination of guitar and piano opens up different harmonic colors than the guitar-vibes interplay. Bobby Thomas swings with authority, pushing the brothers into a slightly sharper edge than the San Francisco sessions.

The best-sounding of the brothers’ albums. The Riverside production makes a genuine difference.

The title is accurate. Wes recorded this in a single session in New York with a rhythm section that included Hank Jones on piano and a young Ron Carter on bass. Jones brings an entirely different character from Mel Rhyne's organ: where Rhyne provides sustained harmonic beds, Jones comps with a spare, precise elegance that opens up huge spaces for the guitar to fill. Carter, at 24, already plays with the deep tone and attentive responsiveness that would make him the most recorded bassist in jazz history.

Lex Humphries drives the rhythm with a relaxed swing, and Ray Barretto adds subtle Latin percussion textures that lift the midtempo pieces without ever overcomplicating them. The combination gives Wes a foundation that is lighter and more transparent than the organ trio format, and he responds by playing with an ease and confidence that makes every track sound like the most natural thing in the world.

The best small-group studio record from the Riverside period not named Full House. The rhythm section makes the difference.

Two of the most naturally swinging improvisers in jazz history, meeting in a Riverside studio with no agenda except to play as well as they can and see what happens. Milt Jackson got the nickname "Bags" from the bags under his eyes, but it fit the easy, rolling groove of his mallets, the way he laid back just slightly behind the beat and made everything feel unhurried. Together they share a front line like two people finishing each other's sentences.

Wynton Kelly is the glue, his right hand filling every gap Bags and Wes leave behind, comping with his characteristic mix of funk and swing. Philly Joe Jones drives with his usual ferocity; he is never content to just keep time and the constant prodding from behind lifts the soloists. "S.K.J." is one of the great tracks in the Riverside catalog. The ballads show you what both men could do when the tempo dropped to something slow and considered.

One of the great meeting records in jazz. You can hear both men enjoying themselves, which is the best thing a jazz record can do.

The greatest jazz guitar live album ever recorded. The Tsubo was a small club in Berkeley, California, and the night the tape was running, everything clicked. Wynton Kelly and Wes had the conversation they had started on Bags Meets Wes! the previous December. Johnny Griffin is on fire, his fast lines slicing through the room with the particular ferocity of a man who knows the moment is right and does not want to waste it.

"Full House" itself is nine minutes that justify the whole enterprise. Wes builds his solo from single notes to octaves to block chords in the architecture he had by now made entirely his own, but here the construction is perfect: each section arrives with such inevitability that you feel like you knew it was coming. You did not. Nobody could have. This is music that reveals itself as it happens, and the audience at the Tsubo got to be in the room when it did.

If you own one Wes Montgomery record, it should be this one. If you own two, the other one should be The Incredible Jazz Guitar.

Back to the organ trio, back to Mel Rhyne, and the familiar format produces some of the most confident playing in the entire Riverside catalog. Wes sounds settled here, comfortable, playing to the warmth of Rhyne's organ chords rather than against them. The title is accurate without being boastful. It is a guitar record the way a hammer is a hammer: the instrument is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and the person holding it knows exactly how.

"Days of Wine and Roses" from the Mancini score gets a reading that turns it from a movie song into a jazz vehicle, Wes finding the melodic core and developing it at leisure. "Fried Pies" is a blues workout that goes on exactly long enough. Jimmy Cobb is a different drummer than Paul Parker from the 1959 trio date, more assertive, pushing the tempo in a way that keeps Wes from ever settling too comfortably into a groove.

The last trio record Riverside put out while Wes was still on the label; two more trio sessions that October and November sat in the vault until Portrait of Wes and Guitar on the Go. Rhyne was back for those later sessions, but this is the last time the trio got a proper release while it was still a working band.

Jimmy Jones wrote the charts and conducted. Jones's string writing gives the orchestrations more color and movement than the typical add-a-string-section exercise, and the rhythm section is quietly excellent: Kenny Burrell on second guitar, Hank Jones on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, Osie Johnson on drums.

But the format still constrains Wes. He cannot stretch out, cannot build the long solos that define his best work. What you get instead is Wes playing beautifully within a narrow lane: his tone warm against the strings, his phrasing impeccable, his choices tasteful. It is pleasant. On a Wes Montgomery record, pleasant is underachievement. Jones's arrangements are professional and the rhythm section is first-rate. The setting was just the wrong one for this particular musician.

Not the failure the format might imply, thanks to the arrangements and the excellent rhythm section. But not where you hear what Wes could do.

A collection of unissued session leftovers, plus two tracks already out on A Dynamic New Sound and Boss Guitar, assembled after Wes had already moved to Verve. The music is fine, Wes is always Wes, but the selections feel like they are here because they were available rather than because they represent his best thinking. That is the nature of the leftovers compilation: it serves the catalog more than the artist.

There are moments worth finding: a blues here, a ballad there, that remind you what the Riverside years produced at their peak. The organ trio format gives every track a loose energy that suits Wes. But as a complete statement the record lacks the coherence of the albums he made with intention. Worth having for completists. The completist already knows that.

A necessary document for the full picture. Not a necessary listen for anyone who does not already know the essential records.