Keck’s Occasional Blog

Seven years ago I used to do music journalism. I had a very specific aesthetic when it came to writing these articles, and the editors I dealt with usually went to great lengths to destroy the way I had constructed the interview. I thought I might reprint some of those pieces now, as I originally envisioned them, beginning with a piece on John Scofield which I wrote for the The Spectator in Raleigh. That paper no longer exists, and I’m glad–the editor for that rag really pissed me off. I can’t remember his name, but if I could I would track him down and harass him for his strict adherence to total mediocrity.

John Scofield – June, 2001

[Words in italics are those of John Scofield, guitarist.]

I’m just trying to play. I’m just trying to get better. I’m trying to get more powerful in the music, and have it be more of a statement, and I can’t quite get the adjectives to say what I want that statement to be because it’s music; it’s a different idiom.

This happened years ago. It’s midnight; black hills of southern Virginia are hunkered down against the dark. I feel the car shifting its weight as it careens recklessly along empty highway, and my friend Chad has put on music that I’ve never heard. But I have heard it before. It resonates in my chest, the cadence of heart beat and breath, and in my head it sings like the saintly dead. I’m wreathed in Milky Way stars, and John Scofield with Medeski, Martin and Wood are pounding out a beat in such a way that would halt even Dick Clark from going to teenage dance freaks looking for answers: these boys got Mojo for your ears and your feet. Ah, friends, when I heard those melodies that night in Virginia (even with my lousy Ford factory speakers), I knew what it was like to hear the greats like Davis, Coltrane, and Monk in their prime and charting new territory in the jazz universe. I bartered with Chad for possession of that album, A Go Go (Verve, 1998), and I have not taken it out of my car since. Few recordings are worth a case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

I did not realize it at the time, but this was not my first encounter with John Scofield. When my love of 70s fusion led me to Miles Davis’ often dismissed 80s explorations, Scofield was on many of those recordings. He was an integral part of Davis’ band for a little over three years starting in 1983.

I was there with Miles, and it was really creative music, and it was one of the great periods for me to be around him, you know, one of my idols, one of the great icons and musicians, and to really check out how jazzy he was, how into the whole history and continuum of the music that was speaking through him in that music in the 80s. It was swinging like a motherfucker, and it was killing. I think people will realize that on the better tracks that he did during that time. I mean, all you’ve got is records and that’s different—I was there playing and touring with him for three years.

Scofield now holds an exalted status in the jazz world as one of the great guitarists. On his most recent record, Works for Me (Verve, 2001), a wonderful recording of tunes in a mid-60s post-bop mode, Scofield is backed by such jazz wonders as Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, the late Billy Higgins, and Kenny Garrett—an ensemble that only a legend could assemble. However, despite several great traditional jazz records, it was not my taste for jazz that made me tune into Scofield’s playing, and it will not be traditional jazz that Scofield and his band bring to the Cat’s Cradle.

When he swings into the Old North State, Scofield will be sporting a trio of supporting musicians: Avi Bortnick on rhythm guitar, Jesse Murphy on bass, and Adam Deitch on drums. Expect this band to own you for a few hours with songs that range from the melodically sublime to just downright, twist-your-face-up-in-disbelief ugly. Instead of falling into tedious repetition, as so many jazz/funk/fusion bands do, Scofield’s ensemble infuses its music with a refreshing complexity and sense of play. They are guaranteed to have your tail feathers shaking.

Just as Scofield was part of Miles Davis’ search for a new sound in jazz in the 80s, Scofield is searching as well at the break of the 21^st century. In the 1990s, the realm of jazz finally began to embrace its offspring—hip hop and r&b—and suddenly the greatest of American musical traditions was sounding fresh in ways that had been absent for almost 20 years. Scofield’s 2000 Verve release, Bump, is a shining example of contemporary jazz that transcends the accepted standard of what jazz should be and shoots off toward regions of delicious funk and electronica influenced riffs.

I’ve always played kind of funky tunes, so it’s always been a part of my vocabulary. Certainly the electronic drum machines and samplers are not new, but they’re really getting sort of accessible to me, anyway. Or just guys are really knowing how to use them and incorporate them into music in a natural way. I mean, our band is a band and we mainly play. It’s not like a studio thing where everything is coming out of a sampler at all, but we’re incorporating some electronic stuff along with our live playing, you know, and that’s been a lot of fun and exciting. The challenge is making it real and not just using something because it’s there. That’s been fun. It’s finding the parts of that world that I can relate to. And there’s a lot of crossover because hip hop comes from r&b, which comes from jazz, and blah blah blah. It’s finding the elements in electronic music that can enhance and be part of your existing sound.

In a world of music which is increasingly prefabricated to suit the tastes of demographics, John Scofield is a constant beacon in the long, dark night of the boy bands and one size fits all pop divas. One cannot deny that in Scofield’s music, and the treatment he gives to others’ material, there is a searching, a constant quest for THE SOUND which will be unlike anything musicians and audiences have heard before—and yet, as always when the he and his bandmates achieve those moments, the sonar landscapes they map out are strikingly familiar, steeped as they are in the vast traditions of American music.

What I really like doing is playing with people consistently night after night and developing a sound with them. For me, what’s really more important, more fulfilling and gratifying is getting to play with these guys night after night and developing the music.

Scofield’s quartet that will roost in the Cat’s Cradle for a few hours Sunday night plays jazz like it should be: off the hook grooves that make you want to spasm into aisles or onto dance floors, cosmic explorations that make your ears feel like rockets taking your mind to other dimensions. It’s impossible to sit still when this band is in full-tilt, pulling from the great tapestry of American rhytmn and blues styles, laying down the serious hot-July-tent-revival FUNK. Other bands aim for this nirvana of musical space, but often miss. Scofield’s quartet delivers, due in large part to an understanding of musical form that lesser talents lack.

I’m just trying to be in the moment and let the thing happen with the other musicians that can when we’re all really playing together and creating together, and trying to allow that and to nurture that. That’s what I really live for, when the band is grooving, together, and maybe going into some uncharted territory. It’s a subtle thing. You sort of have to wait for it to come around, just like life, you know? And when that clicks, that’s what I’m trying to get to.