Five Bucks Well Spent

During my cross-most-of-the-country trip, I visited a few pawnshops and junk shops. One of them had good clean copies of several LPs including Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow, Leon Russell And The Shelter People, and the iconic Super Session. Plus this one. I didn't take this picture --- the record is currently spinning on my MMF-5.1se and I'm too lazy to photograph it.

Road Song, recorded in 1968, is a great example of listener-friendly jazz. Most jazz biographers --- most jazz people in general --- would like to pretend that A Love Supreme was the last jazz record ever made, but in fact there was plenty of music in the genre recorded during the Sixties and Seventies that was neither hard bop nor fusion. Here we have Wes with strings, Wes playing Beatles covers, Simon&Garfunkel covers, what much of the listening audience would consider a Sinatra cover. This is not the fearless Smokin'-At-The-Half-Note Wes Montgomery. More like Uncle Wes, really, a great platter for a rainy afternoon or a late evening.

Recommended.