These recently discovered tapes are a rare treat. Professionally remastered, they yield nearly an hour of early Wes Montgomery, demo-taped at work in his home city long before he was discovered by the wider world. It's the jazz equivalent of stumbling upon a family video of some famous film star while he was still pumping gas or flipping burgers. Better still, these private tapes of the great guitarist and his friends jamming in Indianapolis clubs around 1957 are genuinely impressive. Inspired by what the groups of Miles Davis and Art Blakey were then doing, their music wears remarkably well. Contemporary photographs show that Wes already owned an L5 Gibson guitar and a pretty good amp. More to the point, all aspects of the artistry that made him an international star were already in place. Take his theme and solo on ‘Misty’, where his beautiful tone and phenomenally clean thumb-picked articulation are as immaculate as anything he would later cut in the recording studios of New York and Los Angeles. He wasn't yet majoring on the octaved or fully-chorded choruses that would later amaze fellow guitarists, but glimpses of these techniques can be heard when he exchanges fours on ‘Straight No Chaser’, a Thelonious Monk blues that Miles had recently revived. Some of the musicians remain unidentified but it's certain that most tracks involve Wes' two brothers, bassist Monk and pianist Buddy – who takes a particularly impressive solo on ‘Take the A Train’. Other tracks feature Mel Rhyne, a future recording partner and already playing organ, within a year of Jimmy Smith hitting New York. Wes' distinctive single-string ballad lines on ‘Body and Soul’ or ‘Darn That Dream’, a guitar-organ duet with Rhyne, are sublime. The final bonus and the major oddity of this treasure trove is a satirically low-down blues, probably a request at the end of a particularly long night. Buddy opens it with some tinkly mid-west piano blues before Wes, his amp cranked up to edge of distortion, reaches down for some jangly urban blues of a type never heard from him on record before or since.