Album Reviews

Don Sebesky’s glib big band charts for “California Dreaming” and for a few other tunes on this 1966 Creed Taylor Production may exude almost comical “action television series” theme music swagger (I’m thinking “Mannix”), yet Wes Montgomery’s physical daring and sense of lyrical beauty quickly overcome any reservations you might have about being seen enjoying a blatantly commercial enterprise like this.

This brand of “music to accompany a long pan of Malibu coastline homes” once served as a kitschy depiction of sophistication. Today it serves to define a bygone era.

Listening to Montgomery and the top studio guys back then plus Herbie Hancock, expertly carrying out Don Sebesky’s orders and bringing his musical expression to life is the real entertainment on this well-recorded ten tune set.

Montgomery gets guitar backing from Al Casamenti and Bucky Pizzarelli, there are clusters of horns, woodwinds and reeds snaking through the music and a light percussive breeze flows through it all.

Montgomery’s mellow-sounding Gibson hollow bodied electric is front and center with the all-important textures of the guitar great’s thumb hitting the strings captured with great precision by Rudy Van Gelder. It’s not exactly a spacious recording, with lots of isolation obvious in the clustered groupings of instruments, but timbres are pleasing and the picture retains great atmosphere despite the artificiality.

Montgomery alienated fans as he got more commercial, but the more commercial he got, the more albums he sold. That’s just the way it is. The later A&M records Montgomery made make this sound almost avant-garde.