es Montgomery Write His Own Blues? Four Tunes That Teach the Whole SystemWhy Did W
Wes Montgomery didn't just play the blues — he composed his own: Cariba, The Thumb, Fried Pies, West Coast Blues. And that choice is worth a weekend's reflection, because a master's own blues tunes are where his thinking shows up in its most distilled form — no standard's melody to serve, no arranger's frame, just the twelve bars and everything he believed about music poured into them. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, Berklee-trained guitarist Junewon Choi treats these four tunes as a curriculum in themselves, and his online jazz guitar lessons walk them one chorus at a time.
What does a self-written blues reveal that a standard doesn't?
Priorities. When Wes plays someone else's tune, you hear his voice negotiating with the material; when he writes the tune, the material is the voice. Every choice — the groove, the key, the shape of the head, where the tension sits — is his answer to the question "what is the blues, to me?" That's why his own blues heads never sound like a 12-bar cliché: they're melody and harmony moving together across the neck, built by a player who heard the blues as sound and structure, not as a box with attitude. Listening to them is like reading a master's notebook instead of his performance.
What does each tune teach?
Heard as a set, the four tunes stop being repertoire and become chapters:
Cariba (B♭) — the Sound. A Latin-groove blues built on the tension between major and minor thirds: the color of the blues placed deliberately, before any "blue note" cliché.
The Thumb (G) — the Line. A riff-and-groove blues driven entirely by diagonal movement — the line travels with the harmony and connects the changes instead of parking.
Fried Pies (F) — the Voice. The same materials turned personal: phrasing and motivic development making twelve shared bars sound like one man.
West Coast Blues — the Capstone. Wes's jazz-waltz blues, the tune where sound, line, and voice fuse into one statement — proof the system was never three separate skills.
Sound, then line, then voice: that ordering isn't marketing — it's the order the skills actually stack in a player.
Why does West Coast Blues tie it all together?
Because it bends the one thing the others kept fixed: the meter. A blues in waltz time can't survive on habit — the familiar phrasing anchors are gone, so whatever remains is understanding. In West Coast Blues you hear the blues sound intact, the diagonal line intact, the personal phrasing intact, all inside a form that refuses autopilot. It's the final exam disguised as a beautiful tune, which is exactly why it belongs at the end of the sequence and not the beginning.
How should you actually spend a weekend with these tunes?
Make a playlist of the four originals — Full House for Cariba, Tequila for The Thumb, Boss Guitar for Fried Pies, and Wes's classic recording of West Coast Blues — and just listen for a day before touching the guitar; as we argued in The 'Big Ears' Secret, the masters learned exactly this way. Then pick the chapter you're weakest in and live there. And remember the blues rewards feel over flash — More Than Technique: Finding the "Blues" is the companion read on that. If you're earlier in the journey, the Building Blocks course — including its free blues section — is where the foundations live.
Where can you study all four, one chorus at a time?
The Wes' Blues Insight Bundle collects the whole arc: Cariba, The Thumb, and Fried Pies, plus West Coast Blues as the bundle-only capstone — each with a chord-melody arrangement, solo transcription, 10–15 minute breakdown, and full PDF with notation and TAB. Four tunes, four chapters, one system — Wes's own blues, opened the way he built it.
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