Wes Montgomery Guitar Tab Books, Instruction DVDs, Solos, Arrangements, Video Lessons

 Wes Montgomery Plays "Airegin"

     Regarded by many guitarists to be his most outstanding jazz guitar record, it showcased luminaries Tommy Flanagan on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Albert Heath on drums. Of the many excellent cuts on the record, Wes' originals "West Coast Blues" and "Four On Six" are impressive titles and have become bonified jazz standards! As a result of the recording, Montgomery began to get long overdue music critic honors and awards. That year he won the prominent "Downbeat Critics New Star Award", a 2nd place in the Metronome Reader's Poll, and was voted "Most Promising Jazz Instrumentalist" in Billboard Magazine!

     Landmark recordings to follow consisted of: "Boss Guitar", "Full House", "Movin' Along", "So much Guitar", and "Fusion". Wes signed with Verve Records in 1964 and went into a new phase of his jazz guitar music career. During the Verve Record Company years (1964 - 1966), and subsequently with A & M Record Company (1966 - 1968) Wes produced records, with the help of Creed Taylor, which acquired higher commercial success with a pop audience - something of an anomaly in the jazz music world!

     From the very beginning, Wes Montgomery appeared to hear things in a different way on the guitar! One glance at any online video performance of Wes Montgomery is more than telling and continues to amaze guitar performers even today! Wes rested his picking hand with the fingers spread out on the face of the guitar and the pickguard edge a little behind the neck pickup. Wes employed down strokes primarily, however he could carry out long complex solo lines with alternating down-up strokes when desired.

     Wes Montgomery's melodic conception has actually been referred to as "horn like" - small wonder as he drew visible motivation from artists such as Charlie Parker who played alto sax, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins who played tenor sax and Miles Davis who played trumpet in addition to conventional jazz guitar players such as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. The fingering of his single note guitar lines from simple harmonic statements to earthy blues lines and scorching bebop passages has constantly been a source of consternation amongst jazz guitar purists!

     Like numerous blues and rock guitarists, Wes rarely used his "pinky" or 4th finger of his left hand for single note lines, regardless of their complexity or physical demands. Furthermore, his technique was incredibly linear. He generally attached a variety of positions laterally up and down the guitar fingerboard in one line and regularly shifted on a solitary string. As a result, he appeared to stay away from the routine position boundaries of guitaristic "box playing". Consequently, most of his guitar phrases overlapped and dovetailed each other in the way of chord inversions organized horizontally on the guitar fingerboard.

     Wes Montgomery was a real guitar innovator and a true jazz pioneer! In his quest for sonic growth, he developed a trademark parallel octave technique, which is perhaps his most recognizable musical characteristic - specifically to the mainstream public. An octave in this circumstance is an interval 8 steps apart, fingered as a dyad and articulated like a 2 note chord. His specialized playing technique with octaves on the guitar remains unmatched to this day, as just a short listen to practically any of his recordings will confirm. The articulation for octaves was a variation of Montgomery's above talked about "thumb attack". When playing octaves he did not place his fingers on the top of his guitar, but evenly touched the pick guard and the body of the guitar.

     Among the most interesting attributes of the guitar playing style of Wes Montgomery was his jazz chord playing! He had a natural gift for chord melody solos and was able to seamlessly incorporate improvised block chording into his solo playing - as in "Cariba", "Sundown", "Missile Blues" and various others. His harmonic conception was "piano thinking" applied to the guitar and at the time appeared rather difficult - especially when thinking of the ease and smoothness with which he performed his chord passages even at break neck speeds! Wes simply heard it that way and once again, redefined the rules!

     Wes was just as adept at balancing and playing a melody (the head of a song) with his block chord method, regularly developing uncommon and very beautiful voicings to the harmonic structure of the tune! Instances in point are the ear catching concepts heard in the Broadway standard "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" and his original composition "Mi Cosa". He played his chord passages with a thumb strumming style similar in articulation to his octave playing.

     Wes Montgomery was a true master of melodic creation - having the facility, emotional material, style, and creativity to change any piece into an ear capturing musical experience. As an improviser Wes was specifically interested in motif development, however in a natural and instinctive method. He was the consummate story teller - leading an enthralled audience in chorus after chorus of emotional playing - exposing a motif here, developing it later on, presenting a blues move, then seasoning it with bebop modernism and chromatic tension release.

     Wes' motifs and signature lines ran the gamut from easy blues ideas to complex bebop lines. Just like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, Montgomery was always mindful of precisely where he was in the harmonic scheme of a composition. He frequently altered structures, melodic and harmonic intricacy, and changes of register. Lastly, regardless of the pace Wes Montgomery kept lyricism, fluidity, and beauty - and over all else, "soul" in all of his improvising!