Taylor and the various arrangers also devised a system of getting ideas across to the guitarist that didn't involve sheet music. "The arranger, whether it was Oliver Nelson or Don Sebesky or whoever, would simply do a Fender Rhodes tape of the structure of the arrangement.

They'd make a tape of it, along with vocal instructions: 'Wes, you play here, da da da...and this is going to be brass figures behind you.' I would send the tape out to Wes while he was on the road. Of course, he rehearsed in the hotel room all the time. He'd sit there with the headset on and listen to the tape, so when he came back to New York, he was ready to go."

Montgomery's playing always featured an innate sophistication, which is especially striking when his lack of formal study is considered. "He's like Chet Baker," Taylor says, another famous jazzman with a distinct sound and technique despite a lack of training. "He never dwelled on a G minor 7 or whatever. His ear just took him wherever the song was going."

It was Montgomery's third studio album of 1965 that spread his name furthest, and it did so through an unlikely source: the title-track take on the Little Anthony and the Imperials single "Goin' Out of My Head."

Taylor had the idea for Montgomery to cover the song because, he says, "I knew [songwriter] Teddy Randazzo, and I really respected his musicality and songwriting ability. If you take away the R&B performance and just look at that song, it's an absolutely marvelous song to improvise on.

For that time, it had sophisticated changes and the whole structure was great. I was thinking, 'This would be perfect for Wes Montgomery. But how am I going to overcome the fact that here's Wes and his background? He'd be about the last person to listen to Little Anthony and the Imperials.'

"I can remember to this day when I brought that record to him," Taylor says. "He was actually at the Half Note, in the West Village. He was there with Wynton Kelly and that group. I brought the record by and said, 'Listen to it.

Oliver Nelson is going to write the chart for this, and Oliver can take any kind of a song and mold it into a context that you're going to be very happy with.' So he decided, 'OK, whatever you say,' more or less. "During the session, some of which was live and some overdubbed, I walked over to Wes-I have a photograph of it: I'm whispering in his ear, 'Wes, remember we agreed that you'd play the melody in octaves.'

Of course, the jazz critics would never let go of it. I corrupted this artistic diamond in the rough or whatever and made him do all this tapestry stuff."

Goin' Out of My Head garnered a Grammy and immediate airplay friendliness and sales that, by now, have crept up to around a million. Commercial firepower and Grammy-winning accessibility notwithstanding, it's a classic big-band album, with smart charts by Nelson and stolen moments of Montgomery's guitar grandeur and romantic truth scattered throughout.

The title track that made so much commercial and critical noise is all of 2:12 in duration, but the album also features plenty of jazz fiber, including the Montgomery originals "Boss City," "Twisted Blues," with a hip and spidery single-line solo, and "Naptown Blues," which is suave but also has a nervy swagger, ending on a brash, dissonant chord.

The guitarist then cut the lightly Latin album Tequila-the only album he ever made without a keyboardist-with string arrangements by Claus Ogerman and featuring the talents of bassist Ron Carter, drummer Grady Tate and conguero Ray Barretto. It's an airy, melodious record, with the standout track being the gently brooding Montgomery original "Bumpin' on Sunset," which features him playing double octaves-the same note played in three octaves.

Montgomery, no doubt emboldened by the cachet of success in his commercial ventures, recorded blowing albums in September 1966, with organist Jimmy Smith: The Dynamic Duo and Further Adventures of Jimmy and Montgomery. These sessions were one way to satisfy his jazz urges, which he was also able to engage, in some measure, on gigs so long as he fed his newly configured audiences the hits they craved.

Though his commercial prospects were brightening by the day, Montgomery reserved some of his greatest admiration for instrumentalists other than guitarists, especially jazz musicians who were busy pushing the envelope rather than riding a commercial groove. In a "Blindfold Test" in Down Beat with Leonard Feather in 1967, Montgomery paid polite respects to the various guitarists Feather played for him, including George Benson, Howard Roberts, Joe Pass, Gabor Szabo and Grant Green.

Feather finally asked him, "Can you think of any albums you'd give five stars to?"

Montgomery replied "...that's pretty weird-can't think of any five-star records! Oh, this new thing by Miles, Miles Smiles, Now that's a beautiful thing. He's beginning to change his things all the time, but he hasn't gone all out, and Wayne Shorter's playing a little different. It's nice. Joe Henderson's got a thing I think would be five stars, too. I think it's Mode for Joe-he and McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Richard Davis."

Montgomery's choices reveal that he had his ear trained toward the day's challenging sounds-not veering all the way to the avant-garde but certainly separate from the commercially oriented middle ground he was then locked into.

At one point, Montgomery did some West Coast dates with John Coltrane's group, and he was even offered an invitation to join Trane's band. "John was among the people very impressed with Wes," Keepnews says. But the guitarist declined Coltrane's invitations, partly due to his insecurity about playing with the saxophonist, whom he revered. (Montgomery plays a beautiful version of Coltrane's "Impressions" on the expanded Smokin' at the Half Note