I Love Blues
Nica’s Dream
"Love Affair" Rehearsal
The End Of A Love Affair

Impressions
Twisted Blues
Here’s That Rainy Day
Jingles
Boy Next Door

Four On Six
Full House
Here’s That Rainy Day
Twisted Blues
West Coast Blues

20-page booklet
Liner notes by Pat Metheny
Foreword by the Montgomery family
Afterword by Carlos Santana
Cover photo by Lee Tanner
Booklet photos by Duncan Scheidt, Chuck Stewart
Memorabilia collage
Total time: 78 minutes

Afterword: Watching these video treasures of the magnificent Mr. Montgomery leaves me with a profound sense of awe and appreciation for this twentieth-century genius. There is something magical and transforming about seeing and hearing this kind of excellence done with such apparent ease and enjoyment.

It’s all here: the beauty, the elegance, the daring, and the sheer guitar mastery of this man who, seemingly, possessed an unbounded imagination and the ability to transform thought into music that remains unequalled today, nearly forty years after his passing.

—Carlos Santana

Sample Liner Notes by Pat Metheny: In the mere nine years that Wes Montgomery made records under his own name, he established an eternal presence in the music world that can be counted as one of the most enduring testaments to the power of improvisational music.

By 1965, when these European television broadcasts were made, Wes was widely regarded as the premier guitarist in jazz. He had recently completed a long stay with Riverside records that had quickly solidified his place as the most important player on the instrument since Charlie Christian.

...

For all of his acclaim and fame, Wes is woefully underrepresented on film. While the Wes Montgomery we know from his best records, playing with the musicians that he was most associated with, appears not to have ever been captured on film, the three shows represented in this DVD release, especially in this newly restored and sonically remastered form, are welcome and insightful additions that provide an incredibly intimate view of Wes in action.

The first segment comes from Holland and features a Dutch rhythm section— pianist Pim Jacobs, his brother, bassist Ruud, and maybe the most consistently important Dutch musician of that era up through today, drummer Han Bennink.
As with the footage from Britain that concludes this DVD, this is Wes playing with musicians that he was most likely totally unfamiliar with, a situation well known to musicians as playing with a “pick up” rhythm section.

I can attest that this experience can often lead to mixed results. Yet there are some musicians who seem to not only be able to play with anyone, under any conditions, and sound great, but make the others around them play and sound their best too. (Clark Terry would maybe be the ultimate example of this rare and wonderful phenomenon; how many over the years have witnessed him, without saying a word, somehow transform a junior high school big band from somewhere in the rural Midwest into a swing machine by sheer rhythmic persuasion?)

Wes easily fits into this special category. His spirit and presence, not to mention rhythmic authority, drive the music in a masterful way. The minimum required for everyone was to just hang on and go along for the ride, but there are moments along the way that transcend.

You can feel the incredible enthusiasm of the Pim Jacobs Trio at having this amazing encounter with Wes. Early in the first blues, there is a great shot of bassist Ruud Jacobs where the look on his face almost shouts out the feeling of “I can’t believe I am getting to do this!”

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There are many pleasures with this particular footage, including the lush and beautifully recorded sound. Yet the highlight for me is the opportunity to watch Wes in action in between the tunes as a bandleader.

As far as I know, this footage of Wes setting up the tunes and his detailed explanation of “The End Of A Love Affair” to the guys, is some of the most extensive footage of him talking and just hanging out that there is.

What a treat it is to see this side of Wes in action. To a person, every account of Wes’s personality that I have ever heard describes him as being a genuinely warm, funny and energetic man despite his otherworldly skills and talent. (I can personally pay testament to his generosity and goodness from my own brief encounter with him as an awestruck 13-year-old who asked him for his autograph in April 1968 at the Kansas City Jazz Festival—he spent some time talking to me and was kind beyond description).

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The highlights in fact are the intro and outro to the show where Wes plays a beautiful unaccompanied version of his “West Coast Blues”. On the outro, we are given the same fantastic, over the shoulder, almost “players” point-of-view shot of Wes’s thumb that occurs occasionally throughout this program. Every detail of his thumb technique is revealed, including the several backstrokes on the fast triplet phrase in the melody mixed in with the more prominent downstrokes that he was famous for. For these moments alone, this footage is priceless.

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—Pat Metheny

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