This wasn't, of course, Montgomery's debut album – he'd already taped sets for Pacific Jazz in the co-led Montgomery Brothers line-up (and, per the Resonance issue reviewed in Jazzwise 242, had been captured on private tapes as early as the mid-1950s) – but, to all intents and purposes, this was the record that alerted the wider world to the wonders of Wes. Originally issued on the Riverside label, The Incredible Jazz Guitar… is one of the defining albums of the era, taped at the very beginning of the 1960s, the decade which was to see Montgomery rise to the top of the jazz tree before adapting his signature style to the burgeoning fashion of jazz/pop crossover.

This Wes, however, is the stuff that still leaves fellow six-stringers speechless. It's all here; those trademark octaves, the muted yet glowing tone, those solos that seemed to fall together with no apparent effort but which, upon closer listening, reveal a harmonic mind acutely attuned to the subtlest of changes. Early versions of Montgomery classics like ‘West Coast Blues’ and ‘Four On Six’ are included, as are two of his always personal accounts of jazz standards written by others; the burning Sonny Rollins theme ‘Airegin’, on which he slices through the fast-moving chords like a hot knife through butter, and his beautiful take on Brubeck's ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’. As is always the case with these ‘is it or is it not official?’ European issues there are several bonus tracks added, which appear to have be pulled with no real programmatic logic from other Wes sets. Lovely as they are, the original Jazz Guitar... set is the one that grabs you. Indispensable ‘classic’ jazz.