So Much Heart: HERBIE HANCOCK on Wes Montgomery

 

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“The first time I heard about Wes Montgomery, I was anxious to see what this guy sounded like; this guy everybody was raving about. Those people who were raving about him were right. He was amazing. I had a lot of experiences with him — I made some records with him; I heard him on the radio back then on the jazz stations, and I watched him play the magic that he played and that everybody borrowed from him from that point on. He changed the face of jazz electric guitar.

He had a beautiful way of playing in different settings, whether it was a small group setting of a quartet or a quintet or large-scale things with orchestral accompaniment. He made several records with large ensembles and he was able to bridge the gap between two views of what could be considered jazz. One was more related to the pop side of jazz and the other related to the more hardcore jazz. He just knew exactly what to do depending on the setting. And here's a guy who never studied guitar. He was self-taught. He didn't read music, but he sure had amazing ears, amazing fingers and an amazing heart.

Wes was known for his ability to play his improvisations and/or his melodies in octaves. He created this way of being able to do that and move around quickly on the guitar. As far as I knew, before Wes, nobody knew how to do that. Many guitar players tried to copy what he did. but most of them gave up. George Benson was able to get some of that. I mean, I'm sure he would say that Wes was a mentor for him and his basic style. And as a matter of fact, when George Benson first came on the jazz scene he was playing with Jack McDuff, the organ player, everybody was saying, "Oh. this young kid." which he was then, "This young kid is the next Wes Montgomery." To my ears, it sounded like he followed in the footsteps of Wes Montgomery, but I think the other guitar players quickly gave up the idea of being able to play that octave style the way Wes did it. It just seemed impossible to them. 

Maybe they tried it. I'm sure they all tried it. but they gave up.

I didn't spend very much personal time with Wes. When I saw him at clubs, it was usually because he was performing and it was only actually during the recordings that I made with him at Rudy Van Gelder's studio that I got to have some personal time with him. It wasn't very much because we

were concentrating more on the music that we had to do that day, but Wes was a very personable human, a person full of the kind of heart that you would expect from someone who plays with so much heart. Some musicians can be problems or their egos get in the way. Many times, it's actually an ego problem. But Wes wasn't that kind of person. He had a great humility and a great respect for all the other musicians. I never saw him get into anything like an argument or any kind of confrontation with anybody.

This is another reason the musicians respected him so much. It wasn't just because he was a musician and the talent that he had as an amazing guitar player, but as a human being. He had great humility and never tried to overshadow any other musicians. He just played himself and it was always amazing.

When Creed Taylor started making records with Wes, it marked a change in Wes's style, at least on record. On Creed's records, very often there was an orchestral background. This was not something that was heard prior to that on jazz recordings. There might have been some, but they were few and far between, but the orchestrations on Creed's records were modern for that time — the sixties and seventies.

There was a connection to popular music in that approach. Now this is not rock and roll, but more like the popular music that had evolved from the Great American Songbook and some of those songs were actually from the Great American Songbook, the style from the twenties and the thirties and the early forties. They were so beautiful, although there was a little controversy among musicians about Creed's approach. Many jazz musicians were very protective of the style of playing that evolved from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. that very speedy and very amazing music from a technical standpoint. It was amazing music in itself, but it was also advanced from a technical standpoint, whereas those records that Creed made with Wes were considered by many jazz musicians to be easy listening music.

But whatever negative first impressions the jazz public or jazz musicians had, they quickly changed because they had to. It was just so beautiful that nobody could stay on the other side of the tracks of that. Many musicians not only began to admire it. but they also wanted to make records like that themselves.

When we recorded the records I did with Wes for Creed, it always began with the rhythm section with Wes playing live in the studio; the orchestra was overdubbed later. They were always done that way. Back then. Creed would usually hire what was considered the kind of Blue Note, go-to rhythm section. Ron Carter was often the bass player with Grady Tate on drums. I was not the first pianist in the beginning, but I did play on all or part of around five of Wes's records he did with Creed.

When he played in clubs and concerts, Wes seemed to go back to what he was playing at the beginning, which was more straight-ahead jazz, as you can hear on these recordings. Wynton Kelly was the perfect partner for Wes for that. Wes and Wynton sure could both play the blues and in that jazz style of blues playing. It was funky, yet it balanced the technical side of jazz playing and sophisticated harmonization.

Wes made some records with Wynton Kelly. They sure sounded tight, very much in the same pocket, in the same bag. Wynton and Wes were older than I am. Not much older, but older. Wynton was from the era before I came on the scene. My own harmonic approach to jazz was a little further advanced than Wynton's style, more like something that was influenced by Bill Evans, and so on the records Wes made with Creed Taylor, the style that I played was a style that was probably more closely related to the orchestrations that Don Sebesky demonstrated with what he wrote for the Wes albums — I mean closer than what Wynton did. But we had two styles. They were not opposed to each other, but they were certainly different styles we were playing. And whereas mine leaned kind of between a funkiness that came from my background being born in a Black neighborhood in Chicago, which is a blues town really, along with harmonies that grew out of composers like Maurice Ravel, whom I listened to a lot. as well as other composers like Stravinsky and many other more modern composers. That wasn't Wynton's bent. His was in a way kind of closer to the bone and maybe my style had some other ornaments that I put on the bones.

When Wes came on the scene, everybody was talking about him and they continued to talk about him for years because his playing continued to evolve into different settings as the harmonic structure and the focus of jazz recordings began to expand into the pop area, while still maintaining jazz roots, which was a new thing at that time. And those records he made in that way pioneered that direction and the jazz musicians loved it. It gave them kind of a doorway to being able to sell more records to a wider audience. And not just the selling of the records, but expressing themselves to a wider audience.

The musicians were more about the music than they were about the money. If you were worried about the money, you wouldn't be a jazz musician. That wasn't what we cared about. We cared about the music and that's what we wanted to share. I mean, it's always that. That's the heart of jazz and Wes Montgomery is an integral part of that heart.”

Excerpted from an interview conducted by Zev Feldman on May 26. 2023.