IF you were a jazz guitarist in the late 1950s, you contended with a shadow that had been in place for the better of two decades. That shadow belonged to Charlie Christian, a player who innovated on the instrument as no one else had either before or since.
Christian died in early March 1942, aged twenty-five. He didn’t leave us with a lot, in terms of an expansive body of work. His official corpus — and the informal cuts made at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem — counted for much, but no player had come along and followed him in such a way as to enter the ranks of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, and Jimmy Blanton: the inner circle Hall of Famers of instrumental brilliance.
Someone else was getting ready to, though. He was taking his time, making sure that his chops and his art were in order. That someone was John Leslie “Wes” Montgomery, born in Indianapolis on March 6, 1923 — his birth date and Christian’s death date missing each other by four days — and then charging into the jazz stratosphere in 1959, with the release of his first album, The Wes Montgomery Trio, on Riverside Records.
Montgomery was pushing forty when he hit the national scene. We don’t see a lot of this in jazz, which is another reason why Montgomery’s arrival — and his ascent — must have seemed so unlikely at the time. He wasn’t there, and then he was.
