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Classic Recordings: Norman Brown – After The Storm

Twelve tracks from a guitarist who studied the Wes Montgomery method so closely that he became the most convincing inheritor of it.

Norman Brown

Norman Brown is from Shreveport, Louisiana, raised in Kansas City, and studied at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he later taught. He was signed to Motown's jazz imprint MoJazz in the early 1990s.

The defining technical feature is the octave technique — playing a melody in two octaves simultaneously, with the thumb, which Wes Montgomery developed and which almost nobody else has made their own. Brown uses it constantly, and it gives his lines a warmth and thickness that a single-note player cannot achieve.

After the Storm (1994) was his commercial breakthrough and remains his best-known record. He later won a Grammy for Just Chillin'.

What to listen for

"That's The Way Love Goes" is the Janet Jackson song, and it is the track that made the album — a genuine crossover hit for an instrumental.

"For The Love Of You" is the Isley Brothers, and "Any Love" is Luther Vandross. Choosing covers this well known means competing directly with the vocal versions, and Brown wins by playing the melody with a singer's phrasing rather than a guitarist's.

"Lydian" is the most harmonically serious thing here — the title refers to the Lydian mode, and the composition uses it properly rather than decoratively.

"Acoustic Time" shows the nylon-string side, and "After The Storm" is the title track and the most reflective.

"Trashman" and "El Dulce Sol" are the funkiest, and "Family" and "Take Me There" close things out.

Throughout, listen for the octaves. Once you can hear the technique you will hear it everywhere, and it is the single thing that connects Brown directly to Montgomery.

Go deeper

Wes Montgomery's The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (1960) is the album that everything here descends from, and it is one of the great jazz records.

Montgomery's own later CTI albums — produced by Creed Taylor, orchestrated, and commercially enormous — are where the argument about jazz and accessibility really begins, and they were criticised in exactly the terms later applied to smooth jazz.

George Benson is the other great inheritor of the octave technique, and Pat Martino and Grant Green complete the guitar lineage.

Listening note: the guitar tone is the whole argument here. Round, unhurried, barely any bite on the attack — it is a voice rather than an instrument, and once you hear it that way the album's restraint stops sounding polite and starts sounding deliberate.

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