elve Bars, Different Voice: How Wes Montgomery Made the Blues Sound Like HimselfSame Tw
You develop your own voice on the blues not by finding new notes — everyone shares the same twelve bars — but by how you phrase and develop the material: stating an idea, answering it, growing it across choruses until the structure sounds like you. Wes Montgomery's own blues Fried Pies, from the album Boss Guitar, is the clearest study of that skill. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, Berklee-trained guitarist Junewon Choi builds his online jazz guitar lessons around this distinction: structure is shared property; the voice is what you do with it.
If the form is the same for everyone, where does a "voice" live?
In the decisions the form doesn't make for you. The blues hands every player an identical plot — but it says nothing about where your phrase begins, how long it breathes, whether it answers itself or leaves the question hanging, or how an idea from chorus one returns transformed in chorus three. That's phrasing and motivic development, and it's precisely where Wes is unmistakable. Two bars into a Wes blues chorus you know it's him — not because the notes are exotic, but because the sentences are his. Same twelve bars as everyone; completely different speaker.
What makes Fried Pies the right study for this?
Because it's one of Wes's signature blues heads — the same materials he always used, turned personal. Fried Pies is where you hear phrasing and motivic development doing the heavy lifting: a small idea stated, answered, displaced, and grown until the chorus has an arc instead of a pile of licks. Studying it teaches something copying licks never can — how a master builds, not just what he built. As Junewon puts it: the goal of studying Wes isn't to sound like Wes. It's to learn how sounding-like-yourself is done.
Won't copying a master erase my own voice?
No — it's the opposite, and jazz history is unanimous on this. Your accent survives; what you inherit is fluency. The fear of losing yourself inside a master's playing is one of the most common reasons players stay stuck collecting one lick from everyone and a language from no one:
A lick teaches a word. A full chorus teaches how sentences are made.
Imitation is a stage, not a destination. What remains after deep copying is your own phrasing reflex, upgraded.
The masters all did exactly this — and none of them sound like each other.
We've made this case before in You'll Sound Like Yourself Anyway: Why Copying the Masters Won't Erase Your Voice, and its companion reflection Your Sound Is Inherited traces how every great voice came from a lineage.
How do you practice phrasing instead of licks?
Take one chorus of Fried Pies — or any blues head you love — and work with a single motif for a week. State it. Answer it. Start it a beat later. Start it on a different chord tone. Stretch one note of it and shrink another. You're not memorizing material; you're rehearsing the act of developing material, which is the actual skill a voice is made of. Ten focused minutes a day beats an hour of collecting phrases you'll never own. If you want this same study applied to the standards repertoire, Wes' Insight does chorus-by-chorus work on the tunes Wes made famous.
Where can you study Fried Pies note for note?
In Wes' Blues Insight — Fried Pies, Junewon opens a full chorus of the tune: complete chord-melody arrangement, solo transcription, and a 10–15 minute breakdown of the phrasing and motivic development that turn structure into voice — full PDF with notation and TAB. It's the Voice chapter of the three-tune series through Wes's own blues: Cariba gave you the sound, The Thumb gave you the line, and Fried Pies is where they become someone.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up