There's an unwritten law in this household that our
protracted Sunday morning breakfasts are accompanied by jazz. Nothing too
challenging, but jay-azz nonetheless.
And the other Sunday, the Good Wife announced that these small group recordings
by the great guitarist, Wes Montgomery, are the perfect accompaniment for
pancakes and coffee.
It's one of those Verve 'select double' collections that
came out in the mid '70s and in this case it's basically the renowned Smokin' At The Half Note album with a
few extras: three restored slower numbers that were originally rejected from
the Half Note album, then dressed up
with superfluous orchestration for subsequent release; and two long mellow
grooves recorded with a more restrained Jimmy Smith, the dynamic Hammond
organist, and one of my Latin heroes, 'Mr. Hard Hands', the conguero Ray Barretto.
The Half Note tracks
do indeed smoke without kicking up the kind of conflagration that would
distract you from your pancakes. This was what made the man with the 'golden
thumb' unique. I've always loved the notion that brother Wes – who recorded in
the pre-Verve days on the Riverside label, sometimes with older brother, Buddy,
on piano and vibes, and younger brother, Monk, on bass – developed an ability
to kick up a quiet storm by using his thumb rather than a plectrum for practice
sessions so as not to annoy the neighbours.
Apparently, some pretentious English critic expounded a
theory that his use of the thumb 'reflects a repressed racial minority's eternal
quest for that which will make him stand apart from his former masters'. It
sounds like the stuff of some particularly specious doctorate of philosophy.
Wes himself was more lucid. 'I went into the back room of the house and started
using the flat part of my thumb to pluck the strings,' he explained. 'Then, to
make it even quieter, I began the octave thing, playing the melody line in two
different registers at the same time'.
Not, alas, being a musician, I can never hope to
understand 'the octave thing', but I do know that it produced an instantly
recognisable unique sound. George Benson came close, but you can tell – as indeed
George never denied – that it was a case of the master's apprentice. Comparing
the single-note technique of my other favourite jazz guitarist, Grant Green, as
sharp as a well-honed plectrum, highlights what makes Wes Montgomery's octave
technique, based on muted mellow chords, quite so different.
Another guitar great, Pat Metheny, apparently learnt how
to play by listening to the Half Note
album. The Half Note no longer exists, but it was reputedly small and intimate
and the feeling of the audience's proximity as you listen to the music helps to
give the session such an engaging feel. It's one of the last great moments of
Old Wes before the onset of New Wes: in other words an uncluttered small group
recording like his Riverside classics, this time in the company of Miles
Davis's former rhythm section of pianist Wynton Kelly, the great Paul Chambers
on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, before the last commercial temptation of the
boss guitarist got the better of him.
Wes started and finished early. He began learning the
guitar when he was a 12-year old growing
up in Indianopolis, switching from four to six strings at 20 after hearing
Charlie Christian, the pioneer of the jazz guitar. He died of a heart attack at
the tender age of 43, again in Indianopolis. For the last two years or so of
his life, he experienced the kind of commercial success that was unprecedented
for an era when jazz was the poor relation to rock music.
Jazz purists, of course, were none too happy and it's a
shame that Wes Montgomery's greatness has always been a little mitigated by the
slur of selling out. On the last side of this double record, the two long
tracks with Jimmy Smith, 'James and Wes' and 'Mellow Mood', recorded less than
two years before his premature demise, suggest that he could have kept on
creating on beautiful simple swinging music right up until the end. But Wes was
a family man, who held down a day job manufacturing radio parts while gigging
in the evenings for six years before first achieving critical success, so who
could possibly blame him for succumbing to the filth of lucre?
At its worst, New Wes was overblown and saccharine, but
the lack of taste was more that of the producers. At its best, there are still
some isolated gems, like the wonderful 'Sun Down' – a basic blues with the
addition of some extraneous brass only right at the end – from the album California Dreaming, which has been
described as 'basic pop fluff'.
Personally, I've
never bothered with the late, late Montgomery. I'm with Pat Metheny, happy to
stick with this splendid double and glad to enjoy unembellished versions of
Errol Garner's 'Misty' and the beautiful 'Willow Weep for Me'. Given that he
lived such a short life, it's nice to think that this truly great guitarist
enjoyed both critical and
commercial success. What's more, the functionaries of Indianapolis named a park
after their famous son. That's something which Lesley Knope and her colleagues
from our family-favourite American sitcom, Parks & Recreation, would
applaud.
