Wes Montgomery – The Most Awesome Jazz Music Guitarist Ever – Part 3
From the very beginning, Wes Montgomery seemed to hear things in a different way on the guitar! Instead of going after the conventional “plectrum” or “pickstyle” approach, he opted for a thicker, more soulful tone produced by plucking the strings with the thick part of his right hand thumb. He developed an uniquely personal sound in his single note guitar soloing with this unorthodox, seemingly impossible physical playing approach. His tone and method confounded and enthralled the guitar performers and audiences of his day. One glance at any video clip performance of Wes Montgomery is more than telling and continues to astonish guitar performers today. Fortunately, for aspiring jazz guitar players there are collection books still available of jazz guitar tabs and jazz guitar tablature for many of Wes’s guitar solos.
Wes Montgomery rested his right hand with the fingers spread on the face of the guitar and the pickguard edge just behind the guitar neck pickup. The right hand thumb plucked the strings with a smooth stroke originating from the 2nd joint. The thumb tip was cocked at the first joint at a backward angle, that has led a lot of to assume that he was double jointed. Wes employed downstrokes predominantly but could also play long elaborate lines with alternating down-up strokes when desired.
Wes Montgomery’s melodic conception has been described as “horn like” – little wonder as he drew noticeable inspiration from musicians such as Charlie Parker who played alto sax, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins who performed on tenor sax and Miles Davis who performed on trumpet in addition to standard guitar influences like Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. The fingering of his single note guitar phrases from uncomplicated melodious statements to earthy blues lines and blazing bebop passages has constantly been a source of consternation among jazz guitar purists!
Like quite a few blues and rock guitarists, Wes hardly ever employed his “pinky” or fourth finger of his left hand for single note lines, irrespective of their intricacy or physical demands. Moreover, his methodology was extremely linear. He frequently hooked up a number of positions laterally up and down the guitar fingerboard in one phrase and often shifted on a solitary string. As a result, he appeared to stay away from the regular position confines of guitaristic “box playing”. Instead, a lot of his lines overlapped and dovetailed each other in the manner of chord inversions organized horizontally on the guitar fingerboard.
Wes Montgomery was a true guitar innovator and a jazz pioneer! In his quest for sonic expansion, he created a signature parallel octave approach, which is arguably his most identifiable musical trait – particularly to the general public. An octave in this situation is an interval 8 steps apart, fingered as a dyad and articulated like a two note chord. His technical facility with octaves on the guitar is unsurpassed to this day, as even a superficial listen to pretty much any of his recordings can reveal.
His articulation for octaves was a variation of Montgomery’s above talked about “thumb attack”. When playing octaves he did not put his fingers on the top of his guitar, but lightly touched the pick guard and the guitar body. The stroke was a combination of thumb and wrist motion, much like a downstroke for playing chords. Wes was well-known for his improvised octave solos in tunes such as “West Coast Blues”, “Four On Six”, “Besame Mucho” and “Fried Pies”.
Peabody Conservatory trained guitarist Steven Herron helps guitar players become better guitarists. His company ChordMelody.com features an enormous selection of jazz guitar tabs
as well as instructional DVDs by Wes Montgomery himself. Find out more and claim Steven’s popular free monthly guitar lesson e-course available at: =>
http://www.chordmelody.com/Wes-Montgomery.htm
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