More Amor - A Tribute to Wes Montgomery

Notes on the Album

Wes Montgomery enjoyed an amazing degree of success for a jazz musician in the mid-1960s. By the first part of the decade, he had already wielded his massive influence on a generation of guitarists enthralled with his pioneering, thumb-picking, octaves-heavy playing style. The 60s second half saw his audience diversify and grow exponentially.

Before his death in 1968, his albums regularly hit the upper echelon of Billboard's jazz charts with six-figure sales stats. As his popularity and influence soared beyond his solid base of fans, the genres of radio stations playing his music grew to include R&B and Easy Listening outlets. Today, he is considered a pioneer in the Smooth Jazz radio genre, which didn't begin until 15 years after he died.

During those last years, Montgomery and his commercially savvy producer, Creed Taylor, employed a number of legendary arrangers from varied backgrounds to propel the guitarist to larger audiences. The legendary orchestrators he hired, including Oliver Nelson, Don Sebesky, and Johnny Pate, among others, had as much to do with his increased accessibility as the songs he chose to play.

More Amor, recorded by the Chicago Jazz Orchestra featuring Bobby Broom, is as much a tribute to those gentiemen as it is to Montgomery and that golden musical epoch in his career. With those arrangers' historic musical footprints as a guide, what emerges here is the voice of a band, its soloists, and three highly original arrangers: Alex Brown, Tom Garling, and Charley Harrison.

While he is recognized as a Chicago institution, Broom is actually a native New Yorker with an incredibly rich jazz history as a teenager. His adopted hometown has plenty of jazz guitarists to choose from, but CJO co-founder and Artistic Director Jeff Lindberg could not have made a more appropriate choice. The arc of Broom's career, his singular stylistic development, and his consistent and purposeful effort to keep his music accessible aligns well with Montgomery's ethos.

​

Besides, they're both Smooth Jazz radio pioneers.

"That's right! I never thought of that," Broom said, laughing at the fact that his first album, Clean Sweep (1981), was on GRP Records, the label that was at the foundation of the Smooth Jazz radio format. "But I've always thrived on wanting a bigger audience. I came to Wes through George Benson, and I heard them both on WRVR in New York long before Smooth Jazz radio existed.

"You have to understand Wes was a major star back then," he continued. "He was on variety shows and it was never lost on me that my heroes were playing pop music Benson, Wes, and WRVR taught me a lot about playing jazz and being accessible.

"On this recording, of course you hear the octave and chordal thing Wes is famous for, but overall stylistically it is my voice coming through, especially when I'm soloing."

It is important to note that this idea originated in 2004 as a concert at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. That it grew into a successfully realized album project is the result of a concerted effort among a stylistic musician, an innovative bandleader, a dedicated artistic organization, and the community that supports them.

The ten tracks here also tell a deeper story than the glorification of a musician and his time. This music represents a chapter in the history of Jazz when a fracture of the Young Lions' period of the 1980's begot the modern repertory orchestra movement. That movement was fueled by the founding of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in 1988, now directed by Wynton Marsalis and renamed the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Jeff Lindberg, conductor and co-founder of the CJO, has always been a visionary. He and his late musical partner, trumpeter Steve Jensen, created the Jazz Members Big Band in 1978. The following year, the JMBB became the very first act to play at the very first Chicago Jazz Festival. After a number of albums on the Sea Breeze Records label in the 1980s and after Jensen's death in 1997, the band was renamed and Lindberg became became Artistic Director of the not-for-profit Chicago Jazz Orchestra Association.

Supported by a staff and a board of directors, Lindberg was able to concentrate on the music, and the CJO thrived. Over the decades, national and local jazz orchestras have come and gone, from the high-profile but now defunct Carnegie Hall Jazz Band to the recently formed eponymous big bands in Las Vegas and Saskatoon. Over the years, the CJO has grown and expanded its library with charts and high-profile guests ranging from Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder to local Chicago heroes Kurt Elling and Oscar Brown Jr.

Lindberg, together with his staff and board of directors, has kept the CJO thriving and relevant with regular performances and album releases. Recent recordings include collaborations with arrangers Charley Harrison and Tom Garling, and vocalist Cyrille Aimée, and a live recording at the Evanston venue, SPACE.

Already lionized as the oldest continuously operating jazz orchestra in the Windy City's storied musical history, the sonically pleasing More Amor should solidify the Chicago Jazz Orchestra's standing as one of the most important civic jazz organizations in the United States.

Mark Ruffin, 2025
Program Director, Real Jazz/Sirius XM
Author: Bebop Fairy Tales: An Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance and Baseball