Jazz is rightly celebrated as one of the great venues for individual expression. But the path to develop one’s own voice can involve more than a willed act of self-invention. Think of Indian classical music or Tibetan thangka painting, cultural idioms in which a student subjugates their identity to that of the teacher, with the ultimate aim, after years or decades of work in the mode of the master, of discovering something uniquely their own. Even amongst its autodidacts, jazz makes room for this kind of apprenticeship. Indeed, the commonly bandied term Jazz Masters suggests the idea of a pedagogical system based on a straight infusion from the enlightened ones.

For more than twenty years, Tim Fitzgerald has humbled himself before the enlightened example of Wes Montgomery (1923-1968). He has learned the guitarist’s entire songbook, studying his influential, idiosyncratic voicings, his sensitive touch, the classic manner of his thumb, his eloquent phraseology. In 2009, Fitzgerald published 625 Alive: The Wes Montgomery BBC Performance Transcribed, a meticulously researched book that set the record straight, correcting previous transcriptions and adding new scholarship with analyses of each solo and an interview with pianist Harold Mabern. An in-demand session player around Chicago, Fitzgerald has led numerous groups of his own, many of them focused on Wes. Along the way, steeped in his studies of the titanic forefather, both as a player and as a bandleader and arranger, the dedicated pupil discovered his own voice.

In 2015, Fitzgerald founded Tim Fitzgerald's Full House, a septet with a repertory mission that borrowed its name from one of Montgomery’s compositions (and the live album on which it first appeared). Drawing members from the top shelf of Windy City straight ahead jazz – the vibrant scene that tenor saxophonist Von Freeman called “hardcore jazz” – Fitzgerald turned to folks he’s worked with extensively, including the sparklingly inventive pianist Tom Vaitsas and Grammy-nominated trumpeter Victor Garcia, as well as George Fludas, one of the city’s greatest drummers and a veteran who has worked with Wes’s pianist/vibraphonist brother Buddy Montgomery as well as Mel Rhyne, who played organ with Wes. Working towards this, their eponymous first record, Full House dug in for residencies and one-nighters, cultivating a deep understanding of the material and establishing an approach to Wes quite unlike anything previous. With a “little big-band” vibe that allows them to range back and forth from fulsome arrangements featuring a three horn and guitar frontline to spare soulful small group sounds.

The results are transformative. It’s both a songbook record and an achievement on its own terms. Fitzgerald’s genuine love of Wes shines through, but it’s not a devotee’s slavish re-enactment. Each track crackles and flows with uncorked imagination. It’s gorgeously conceived, a program of precise selections culled from the Montgomery archives and thoughtfully rearranged. The record elucidates the way his music could be ultra-hip modern and deep-in-the-soul downhome at the same time. One of the most unusual aspects of the arrangements (one of them by saxophonist Chris Madsen, one by Garcia, one by Garcia and Fitzgerald, the seven remaining by Fitzgerald) are the soli – passages that reimagine the guitarist’s legendary chordal and octave-based solos as flights of fancy for multiple horns and guitar. Listen to them jet out of Fitzgerald’s solo on “Fried Pies,” executing the music’s tricky figures like Blue Angels zooming together in unison, seeming to stop time for a moment, exuberant and gravity defying.

Fitzgerald arranged a gorgeous sans-rhythm-section version of “While We’re Young,” from Wes’s 1961 Riverside LP So Much Guitar!, recalling Thelonious Monk’s choral arrangement of “Abide With Me” for horns alone on Monk’s Music. Right off the top, “S.O.S.,” originally from the 1962 record Full House, announces the serious intentions of the band – crisp and brisk, taken at the same stinging tempo that gave Johnny Griffin and Jimmy Cobb something to chew on, with a couple of added horns adding slinkiness and gleeful thrill-seeking to the ensemble’s fathomless expression of musicianship.

John Corbett
Chicago
May 2022