1. Road Song (OGD) (Wes Montgomery)
  2. Greensleeves (Arranged by Don Sebesky)
  3. Fly Me to The Moon (In Other Words) (Bart Howard)
  4. Yesterday (John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
  5. I’ll Be Back (John Lennon/Paul McCartney)
  6. Scarborough Fair (Canticle) (Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel)
  7. Green Leaves of Summer (from The Alamo) (Dimitri Tiomkin/Paul Webster)
  8. Serene (Wes Montgomery)
  9. Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (Pete Seeger)

Bonus

10. My Favorite Things (Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II)

Wes Montgomery – guitar
Herbie Hancock (except 08) – piano
Hank Jones (03-06) – piano, harpsichord
Sivert Johnson (01, 02, 07, 09) – harpsichord
Eric Leber –harpsichord (08), recorder (01-02, 07-09)
Richard Davis (except 08) – bass
Ed Shaughnessy (except 08), Grady Tate (03-06) – drums
Ray Barretto, Jack Jennings – percussion (01, 02, 07, 09)
Marvin Stamm, Bernie Glow (01, 02, 07, 09) – trumpet
Wayne Andre, Paul Faulise – trombone (01, 02, 07, 09)
James Buffington – French horn (01, 02, 07, 09)
Stan Webb – clarinet (01-02, 07-09), flute (08), oboe (01-02, 07-09), recorder (01, 02, 07, 09)
Don Ashworth – clarinet (08), flute (08), oboe (except 10), English horn (08), recorder (except 08 and 10)
George Marge – clarinet (08), flute (01-02, 07-09), oboe (08)
Harvey Estrin, Don Hammond – flute, recorder (except 8 & 10)
Bernard Krainis – recorder (except 08 & 10)
Shelley Grushkin, Morris Newman – recorder (01, 02, 07, 09)
Walter Kane (except 08 & 10), Morris Newman (01-02, 07-09) – bassoon
Bernard Eichen, Charles Libove – violin (except 10)
Marvin Moganstern, Tosha Samaroff – violin (01, 02, 07, 09)
Emanuel Vardi – viola (except 10)
George Ricci – cello (except 10)
Charles McCracken, Alan Shulman – cello (01, 02, 07, 09)

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by Don Sebesky

Tracks 01-09: Originally issued as A&M SP 3012
              also issued as CANCION DE RUTA (A&M/Hispavox HDA 371-25 [Spain])

Track 10: Originally issued on CLASSICS VOLUME 22 (A&M CD-2520) and GREATEST HITS (A&M 31454 0519 2)

Recorded on May 7 (03-06), 8 (01, 02, 07, 09, 10) and 9 (08), 1968, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

01 and 08 published by Taggie Music Co. (BMI)
02 published by Northbranch Music Co. (BMI)
03 published by Palm Valley Music, LLC (ASCAP)
04 published by Northern Songs, Ltd.
05 published by Sony/TV Tunes, LLC
06 published by Paul Simon Music (BMI)
07 published by Volta Music Corporation/Webster Music Co. (ASCAP)
09 published by Figs D Music/Sanga Music, Inc. (BMI)
10 published by Williamson Music Co. (ASCAP)

(P) 1968, 1987, 1996

Road Song, the culmination of three sessions in May 1968, represents the last recordings guitarist Wes Montgomery ever made. One month later, he was gone. The final testament of this guitarist’s glory is both an enjoyable listening experience and the apotheosis of what made his music so appealing in the first place. Never once does the record hint that the end is near; there is neither slack nor slightness or anything to suggest struggle or sickness. It is a joyful listen weighted only by the listener’s sad realization that this is all there would be.

Six months after the sessions, Road Song appeared, headed by the album’s memorable title song, perhaps the finest epitaph Montgomery could have crafted for himself. The song began life as “OGD,” an outtake from the September 1966 sessions for The Dynamic Duo, the guitarist’s album with organist Jimmy Smith.1 While “OGD” came off as a bit of bossa blues, Montgomery blazes through “Road Song” with a flexibility that is dazzling. Don Sebesky adds his classic Montgomery counterpoint, perfectly complementing the soloist’s fine performance.

Montgomery’s only other original here is the lovely “Serene.” Likely improvised on the spot, “Serene” is named for Montgomery’s always supportive widow, and catches the guitarist gently conversing with Sebesky’s anything-but-baroque string quartet, making for an unusual third-stream performance recalling “When I Look in Your Eyes” from Down Here on the Ground.

The remainder of the program bathes the guitarist rather beautifully in quasi-classical colors. It’s a fascinating setting for Montgomery and he responds with some particularly effervescent performances. Sebesky, though more of a Stravinsky classicist, had dabbled in this rococo style for other settings (it was a micro-trend in jazz and pop at the time), most notoriously for the Kai Winding/J. J. Johnson album Israel. But he found his groove for Road Song. Clearly inspired by the guitarist, Sebesky provided the project with some of his best, most tasteful classicisms of the period. The Beatles are represented with Lennon’s “I’ll Be Back” and McCartney’s “Yesterday,” while Montgomery baroques the popular jazz standard “Fly Me to the Moon.” Originally known as “In Other Words,” “Fly Me to the Moon” features an uncredited electric piano, which is an attractive new sound complementing the guitarist’s rhythm section. 2

Curiously, the guitarist tackles a number of folk songs in the set, including “Greensleeves,” “Scarborough Fair,” “Green Leaves of Summer,” from the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo, and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Greensleeves” was first popularized as a jazz waltz by the John Coltrane Quartet in 1961 on the Creed Taylor-produced Africa/Brass. Coltrane’s performance mirrors what he had done the previous year with “My Favorite Things,” which the guitarist also recorded during these sessions. Here, Montgomery maintains the waltz time, gracefully scaling the changes like a dancer while Sebesky seasons liberally with the subtlety of German composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s sublime Shakespeare suites.

“Scarborough Fair” was popularized by Simon & Garfunkel on The Graduate (1967) soundtrack. It’s one of the few Simon & Garfunkel tunes to find popularity among jazz players. Here, Sebesky treads lightly on a hypnotic small-group reading of the tune, where the guitarist entrances with a Raga-style drone suggestive of Ravi Shankar or fellow guitarist Gabor Szabo.

“Green Leaves of Summer” is another song not especially popular among jazz players. One senses Montgomery’s attraction to the song was due to the version recorded in 1963 by Herb Alpert, as it appears on the same Tijuana Brass album as “Winds of Barcelona,” a song the guitarist covered on California Dreaming (1967). Montgomery engages sympathetically and more hopefully with Dmitri Tiomkin’s melody, buoyed nicely again by the warmth of the electric piano.

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone” is yet another song – surprisingly – not particularly popular in jazz circles. Here, Montgomery delivers a especially jubilant, near-gospel reading of this folk classic, with Sebesky’s triumphant trumpets shouting to the heavens. The soul-stirring performance is a perfect ending to Wes Montgomery’s final recording, calling for an encore that will never come.

DownBeat awarded Road Song four stars, calling it a “handsome album” and “a model of its type.”3 But it’s pretty clear the reviewer cared more for the player than what he’s playing. “It is not, strictly speaking, a jazz album,” went the review, “but the pulse and the flavor of jazz color it distinctively.” The review cites Sebesky’s “generally excellent” arrangements and notes aptly enough that “like everything the guitarist put his hand to, [the album is] marked with taste, restraint, a finely-honed melodicism and rhythmic sense, and of course the distinctive touch of the master stylist that Montgomery so patently was.”

Road Song reached number one on the Billboard Jazz album chart and number 94 on the Top 200. The album secured two Grammy nominations in 1969, for Best Album Cover (which it lost to Thelonious Monk’s Underground) and Don Sebesky’s minimalist arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” (which lost to “Classical Gas”).

On June 15, 1968, Wes Montgomery suffered a heart attack and died suddenly at his Indianapolis home. He was only 45 years old. The guitarist left behind a widow, Serene, two sons and five daughters. Montgomery passed away at the very height of his popularity, yet today he is still regarded as the greatest guitarist in the history of jazz. The albums he made with Creed Taylor at Verve and A&M remain among his most memorable and stand the test of time as both artistic achievements and entertaining pleasures.

About the cover: “Road Song” (1967 – Kansas City). “Road Song” is among Pete Turner’s most widely admired images. The photographer, mystified by its appeal, thinks its subtlety suggests something different to each viewer. “I had to do a job in Kansas City,” explains Turner, “a boring museum shoot of Chinese artifacts – and I looked out of the plane when I was landing and saw this freshly painted picket fence that went on forever.” Waiting till dusk for just the right light and color of blue, Turner caught the image he was after: “Just a picket fence and brake lights: again, the suggestion of a road more than the road itself.”4 For the cover, Creed Taylor intuitively reversed the image, making the car look as if it’s driving off the album’s edge – a haunting way to suggest a spirit receding beyond our comprehension. Road Song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover and legendary graphic designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis fame named Road Song one of the 100 Best Album Covers (DK, 1999) of all time, calling Turner’s cover image “one of the world’s great photographs.”

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Endnotes:

  1. “OGD” – which stands for “Organ, Guitar and Drums,” the track’s original instrumentation – was not included on the final Jimmy & Wes album but later appeared as part of the 1967 Verve compilation Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz in the ‘60s Vol. 1: The Blues. An alternative version of “OGD” from the same sessions was also included on the posthumously issued Further Adventures of Jimmy and Wes in 1969. The “OGD” title has now been supplanted by “Road Song,” and is covered as such by many guitarists, including Pat Martino, Lee Ritenour and Vic Juris. ↩︎
  2. The album credits both Herbie Hancock and Hank Jones as session pianists. It’s possible that Jones was electrified here. But if the uncredited player is Herbie Hancock, then it precedes – by one week – the Miles Davis sessions for Miles in the Sky, which is said to be Hancock’s first foray with the instrument. ↩︎
  3. Pete Welding, “Wes Montgomery: Road Song,” DownBeat, January 9, 1969. ↩︎
  4. Turner, Pete, The Colors of Jazz (Rizzoli, Yourk), 2006, p. 31. ↩︎