Wes Montgomery

John Leslie Montgomery was born March 6, 1923, in Indianapolis. He took up the guitar at nineteen and was largely self-taught, working out his approach by listening to Charlie Christian records and playing along note-for-note in his apartment. The thumb-picking technique that became his signature, he told interviewers, came from his neighbors complaining about the noise; using his thumb instead of a pick gave him a softer tone that they could tolerate.

He played the Indianapolis scene through the 1940s and early 1950s, sometimes alongside his brothers Buddy and Monk. A stretch on the road with Lionel Hampton's band in 1948 to 1950 was his major early professional credit. He returned to Indianapolis afterward and worked day jobs while playing local club dates at night. Cannonball Adderley heard him play at the Missile Room in 1959 and put a call into Orrin Keepnews at Riverside. Keepnews signed him on the spot.

The Riverside years (1959 to 1963) established Montgomery as the leading jazz guitarist of his generation. The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery won him the 1960 DownBeat critics poll New Star award, and the small-group records that followed (Full House, Boss Guitar, So Much Guitar!) made him a fixture of the Riverside session circuit, sitting in with Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Milt Jackson and Harold Land. The Verve years that followed under Creed Taylor's production traded the small-group format for orchestrated arrangements, drawing critical complaint at the time and broad commercial acceptance.

The A&M years (1967 to 1968) pushed even further toward the pop crossover that Taylor had been steering Montgomery toward. A Day in the Life topped the Billboard jazz chart, reached number 13 on the pop album chart, and became one of the best-selling jazz albums of the decade. Montgomery died of a heart attack on June 15, 1968, at his home in Indianapolis. He was forty-five.