A Day In the Life

iTunes Review

Of all the pop-oriented orchestral albums Wes Montgomery recorded for Verve in the latter stage of his career, A Day In the Life offers the widest spectrum of material. Montgomery’s guitar was such a pristine musical voice that no song on which it is featured is disposable, but “Watch What Happens” and “California Nights” are about as transparent as anything Montgomery took on. He does better when he has a stellar melody in which to sink his teeth, as on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Windy,” the last of which became Montgomery’s biggest hit. As usual the album contains some superlative mood pieces like “Angel,” in which Montgomery’s guitar lines simply twirl and melt into a featherbed of Don Sebesky strings. Still, nothing on the album is quite on par with the title song. Montgomery’s reading of the Lennon-McCartney masterwork is not only one of the finest Beatles covers. It is a career performance that slyly adopts sharp-edged funk without missing the apocalyptic undercurrent of the era. The brooding and the beautiful are rarely so closely intertwined.