Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method: Octaves

The exact path I took to learn how to play block chords as Wes Montgomery did on Too Late Now is a little blurred after over 40 years of studying guitar. My guess is that after hearing Too Late Now I realized that I would have to start out with a simpler tune and purchased other Wes Montgomery records, most of which were in my collection until very recently. My guess is that I bought the album California Dreaming which was released in 1966 and maybe a few other of Wes' pop records (although critics consider these songs pop fluff, they are great for learning Jazz guitar). In any event, my search for a simpler tune ended up with Sunny by Bobby Hebb (Sunny is one cut on California Dreaming you can download from iTunes or listen to Wes play here). I also, at some point, purchased the Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method.

With sheet music for Sunny from Patti Music (in Madison, WI) and some instructional books, I somehow figure out how to play enough chords to get about 3/4 of the way through Sunny, but then got stuck or at least realized that I needed help. I started asking around about guitar teachers and everyone pointed to Roy Plumb. I played 3/4 of Sunny as my audition and told him I wanted to play like Wes Montgomery. Roy must have had an opening (I had to be available at a specific time every week during the day) and what I played or said was good enough to get me in (I have heard that he turned away some Rock musicians who would eventually become his students).

What I'd like to do in the next few posts is look back on that period with what I know today and fill in some of the stumbling blocks that faced me in trying to play a Jazz version of Sunny. What I'm going to assume is that if I got anything useful from instructional books, it was from the Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method (last I checked there was one used book available on Amazon, but it is probably quickly going out of print and out of circulation), so I'll start there.

C Minor Scale in Octaves by George Pasdirtz

The book starts out explaining how to use your thumb for single-note playing. The sample given is the break from Tear It Down. I doubt that I even tried to play the excerpt (I still can't play it at speed with my thumb)! The book moves on to octave playing with some simple exercises. I probably worked on these since Wes plays mostly octaves on Sunny (I'm not sure if I actually played octaves for my audition). The technique is illustrated in the photos above. From the guitar fingerboard (here and here) you can see that octaves (the same note, one octave higher) can be found either three of four frets higher (depending on the string) if you skip one string in between. The left-hand technique involves playing the lower note of the octave with the first finger, deadening the next string with the first finger and then finding the higher octave note on the next string either with the third or the fourth finger. The right-hand technique can either involve playing with the thumb, playing with the first- and third-finger using Classical guitar technique (sometimes called parallel octaves), or with a pick.

One very important point about octave playing comes from Jesse Gress in a Guitar Player article (here):

The trick with octaves is to focus on either the lower (my personal preference) or upper notes only and let the higher octaves “shadow” the lower notes, or vice versa. 

I have tried both concentrating on the lower and the upper notes of the octave when playing and typically I concentrate on the lower note in descending lines and the upper note in ascending lines. Symptoms that I have lost my concentration are usually not playing a clean octave, that is, sounding the strings that are supposed to be deadened or playing a 7th interval rather than an octave. If you're having these problems, concentrate on playing one note in the octave and let the other note take care of itself (let it "shadow" the primary note).

The staff above has some better notation. The fingering is shown to the left of the notes and the fret and string for the first finger is given below. The first note of the C minor scale (in the Key of E flat) starts at the third fret of the A-string and the octave higher C is played on the G-string (skipping the D-string) on the fifth fret. Notice that when we get to the D-string, the first and the fourth fingers are used (the right photograph in the picture above). I've also added a few more extra notes in the last measure to complete all the notes you would need to play the Wes Montgomery version of Sunny in octaves. Also notice that if you start in the second measure with E-flat and go to the second note of the last measure, you have the E-major scale. Why the E-major scale is contained within the C-minor scale (or actually, vice versa) will require an understanding of some music theory which I didn't have when I started playing but will explain in future posts.

Octave playing is a great initial exercise for learning the keyboard and building hand strength, speed and precision playing. Play the C-minor scale linearly from C-to-C and then try to skip notes and create improvised ideas. Try to find other notes from the C-minor scale at other places on the keyboard and try building them into your solos. Learning the guitar keyboard is no trivial matter. The white and black keys are not sitting there staring at you along with middle-C on the piano. Try writing out your good improvised ideas and note the correct fingering.

The reason I chose the C-minor scale in the key of E-flat is that it is the scale Wes Montgomery used to improvise on Sunny and the key he plays the song in. The first four measures of Sunny are displayed above. You should have enough information now to play these measures. When I explain block chords (the symbols above staff), I will provide notation for the chords and get into not only chord solos but also single note solos, which Wes does not use on Sunny but which we could try to imagine and play for ourselves. In future posts, I will also discuss what to do with sheet music when the chord notation is incomplete or even wrong (see the lead sheet for Sunny at Wikifonia here, change the key using the "Transpose" feature changing it to "+3 (3 flats)" and compare the first four measures above). These are all the problems I ran into when I started playing. Now they look easy, then they were insurmountable without help.

For today's aspiring Jazz guitarist, there is a wealth of information available on the Internet: YouTube videos of great players (Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, Kenny Burrell, George Benson,  George Van Eps,  Barney Kessel, Joe Pass, Larry Coryell, Lee Ritenour, John McLaughlin, Emily Remler, Steve Kahn, Pat Metheny, Gabor Szabo, Attila Zoller, Jim Hall, John Pizzarelli, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Ximo Tebar, Graham Dechter, Bireli Larene, Philip Catherine, John Scofield,  Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana,  Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Stern, and many others) video Jazz guitar instruction (here), Jazz guitar solo transcriptions (here, here and here) sites devoted to music theory and analysis, sites that make sheet music available (wikifonia), etc. etc. Some of the instructional material is similar to what was available 40 years ago when I started, unintegrated tidbits from a complex topic. If given enough time, I will try to present what I know in an integrated manner.

NOTE: If you find any errors in the pdf file, let me know. You can also find the .pdf file and the .msc file (for MuseScore, if you have it loaded on your machine) here.