Notes On: Wes Montgomery from the Back Seat

Featuring: Besame - a new composition sampling the sounds of Wes Montgomery

I have a new piece of music to share today called, Besame. After having written this reflection on my chance encounter with Wes Montgomery I felt like taking some of his music and sampling it to see what would happen. Out the other end came this resonant breakbeat tune that slowly phases into the sample and creates an altogether ragged rhythm that I thought I would share. This is a piece of original but simple electronic music that I hope you enjoy as much as the words that follow.

If like what I am doing here please consider leaving a comment and sharing it with your friends and connections - it would mean a lot to me to have your support..

---

I am slouched down in the backseat of my parent’s car on the way back home to Dublin. It’s late, and the dark road is lit only by a stiff shock of light from our high beams that bashes and bounces off the cat’s eyes and scrapes across the hedgerows rising out the darkness. It all fizzes past my window in a wash of white noise. 

I count the lamp posts as they skip by in the sky above. Each tied together by a black wire that rises and dips, slow and sudden, over and over in a dissonant rhythm like a needle caught in a run-out groove. This syncopated slice silently beats a comforting drum against the grey clouds beyond. I am engrossed. Concentrating on each inevitable break or fluctuation in its regularity, a makeshift meditation and a minor escape that repairs the mind on a long trip. 

I realise after a while that my metronomic scene had fallen in time with a bossa nova beat on the car radio. At first just an organ and drum but joined shortly after by a smart guitar melody and a solo in a smooth, rich tone. 

I am listening to Besame Mucho (Take 3). 

It is the first time that I have heard Wes Montgomery play. 

Afterwards the presenter goes on to describe Boss Guitar in detail, offering a comment on the album’s importance in the guitarist’s career - information that I can no longer recall - but I distinctly remember how certain I was in that moment that I needed to hear this album and guitarist again. I needed to find out more. 

---

I recall this moment so vividly. I am unsure why exactly but I suspect it is due to chancing upon such an incredible sound at such an unlikely moment. As a teenager and a young guitarist, to hear the instrument played with a tone that was so personal and direct and a style that was so deceptively simple but proficient, it felt immediately accessible and challenging. It also fundamentally jolted my understanding of Jazz music at the time which had as yet not looked beyond major figures like Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Now I suddenly realised that there was a way for the guitar to bop, swing and jive like the jazz greats, a space to improvise and find expression with a guitar in a trio or quartet. Which meant there was a chance for me to do that with my guitar if I so wished - if only I could work out how. If only I was good enough. I felt inspired. 

I sat silent and wide eyed in the back seat of the car as the music played - my parents oblivious to the young mind being blown wide open behind them in the darkness. The DJ played a couple more songs from the album and moved on, but I have never quite forgotten the moment I first heard Wes Montgomery. And when those moments happen - those chance encounters with something that just clicks, a sort of love at first sight - there is some switch in the brain that flicks on and grabs every memory and feeling it can before glueing it directly to the sensation itself like an emotional post-it note. The sounds, images, smells, sensations; everything becomes a gateway into this visceral moment. 

Wes Montgomery’s skill and mastery of the guitar was undeniable. I am constantly in awe of his flowing thumb pick style and the distinctive octave chord progressions that defined his short career and grabbed my attention that night. I would go on to listen to the entire album shortly after and have listened to it many, many more times since; always with this single memory in my head. And while I have never really connected with his later West Coast sound I find myself seeking out as much as I can from his earlier career or any of the recordings with the Wynton Kelly Trio. 

Here he is accompanied by Harold Mabern on piano, Arthur Harper on bass and Jimmy Lovelace on drums (according to the comments).

Possibly what resonates so strongly is how Wes created a musical bridge for me between the Blues and Jazz. I had fallen into Blues music very early on and grown up enjoying artists like B.B. King or John Lee Hooker - Rory Gallagher is my idol - and now here was a sound that appeared to be based on those familiar Blues progressions but was decorated with incredible Jazz expression and experimentation. To my young ears this was a liberating discovery, it drew a line between so much of what I already knew and it made a lot more sense of Jazz music for a young listener who had yet to join the dots.

Hopefully this will do the same for you and serve as some sort of starting point in Jazz music, or at the very least The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery.