John Scofield struck a familiar chord around the midpoint of his second set at the Ardmore Music Hall on Tuesday. It arrived in the intro to “Old Man,” the iconic Neil Young song. This selection was no surprise — the tune also appears on Scofield’s latest ECM release, Uncle John’s Band — but the tempo was brighter, the energy crackling and alert. When Vicente Archer and Bill Stewart joined the fray, on bass and drums, it brought the sort of kinetic jolt you get at the start of a carnival ride.
Boomer affinities aside, “Old Man” feels like a resonant talisman for Scofield, who is self-admittedly well into his AARP era. His social media handle is oldmansco. Eight years ago, he made an album with the cheeky title Country for Old Men; it earned him his second and third Grammy awards, for Jazz Instrumental Album and Improvised Jazz Solo. Just yesterday, NPR’s Jazz Night in America dropped a new episode in celebration of Sco’s half-century recording career — an appraising gaze in the rearview, with all the accumulated mileage still faintly visible in the frame.
You probably know that Neil Young wrote “Old Man” for the caretaker at his Broken Arrow Ranch in La Honda, California, which he’d purchased with youthful folk-rock winnings. “Old man, look at my life,” he warbles in the first verse. “Twenty-four, and there’s so much more.” So what was Scofield doing at 24?1 Here he is with the Billy Cobham-George Duke Band at the Montreux Jazz Festival. (His solo begins at 1:35.)
Back to the present, with apologies for any whiplash. Scofield has been one of the leading guitarists in jazz for the last four decades, since a time when he was touring with Miles Davis and making his own albums for Gramavision. At the dawn of the 1990s, he formed a quartet with Joe Lovano on saxophones, Marc Johnson on bass and the aforementioned Bill Stewart on drums, cementing his stature as one of our top-tier bandleaders besides. More than any of his closest fretboard peers — Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, and the late John Abercrombie — he’s also leaned into the welcoming arms of Jam-Band Nation, drawing on a lifelong affinity for groove and the blues.
His current trio metabolizes all of this experience: Uncle John’s Band, that 2023 ECM album, is named after a Grateful Dead tune. But the track list also features jazz pieces like Davis’ “Budo,” which made for a zippy highlight in Tuesday’s show. What stood out to me about the trio’s Ardmore hit was just how hard it went on modern-jazz fundamentals: opening with a briskly assured “Blue Monk,” Scofield and crew later carved up Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” and Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin.” There was also a bluesy riff tune with a laid-back bass vamp, reminiscent of Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe” (though it wasn’t), and a gorgeously soulful treatment of the Rodgers and Hart standard “It’s Easy to Remember (And So Hard to Forget).”
The primary bond in the trio is the one between Scofield and Stewart, which again, in case the math doesn’t readily compute, goes back some 35 years. I daresay each musician plays his indisputable best in the company of the other — and even as familiar as their hookup has become, I often found myself shaking my head at the expressive telepathy onstage. This was emphatically true on the uptempo swingers I named above, but it also played out on in-the-pocket fare like “Mo Green.”2 the second tune in the first set. Somebody has posted bootleg video of that performance; given Scofield’s liberal taping policy, I hope it’s OK to share the clip here.
Not sure if you can tell from the footage, but there’s a crucial factor that marks this trio as something new in the Scofield Files. That would be the earthy ingenuity of Archer’s bass playing, which adds a heft and swagger that weren’t necesarily hallmarks of his predecessors, like the heroic Steve Swallow and stalwart Dennis Irwin. I’ve always regarded Archer as the sort of low-end player who keeps a band’s engine purring, and I felt that grounded authority on every tune.
But he also dropped a few bass solos that I’ll be thinking about for a while. The first, in “Blue Monk,” involved some clever conjugation of a phrase around a series of tonal centers: in essence, a practical distillation of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic theory. Later, on a version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” three times more compelling than the one on Uncle John’s Band, Archer created a world within his solo — setting up a three-note motif with natural harmonics, and filling the space between with progressively more expansive digressions. (Were those chiming harmonics his oblique nod to the “jingle jangle” in Dylan’s lyrics? Unlikely, but surely possible.)
One thing the jazz tradition encourages, rare in most other human endeavors, is a routine form of time slippage. A fresh-faced player can reach into the past, accessing truths beyond their grasp; a veteran can return to the fixations of their younger self. All of this happens within a continuum that defies linear understanding, even as it insists on a legible context and some understanding of cause and effect. Scofield, drawing from the bebop wellspring, reminded me of this dynamic. For all of the wry allusions to old age, his energy struck the note of discovery I associate with a kid.
At the same time, he made space for two separate offerings to Carla Bley, the incontestably original composer and pianist who we lost one year ago on this day.3 In the first set, Scofield called “Lawns,” a song that has quietly become one of our newest real-deal jazz standards. Consulting recent set lists, I can see that the trio has been playing it regularly — but the way Scofield set it up here, with a searching rubato intro, I almost felt like it was an impromptu addition to the set.
For an encore, he played another of Bley’s most familiar compositions, “Ida Lupino” — crafting an exquisitely sensitive elaboration on the theme, over a bass-and-drums backing so subtle as to be almost felt more than heard. I found myself thinking about Carla Bley and her longtime partner, Steve Swallow, and how many memories they’d shared with Scofield, how many inside jokes and outré quips were slung across a table, over a bottle of wine and a shambling stack of sheet music. I was deeply moved, by the sincerity of the gesture and the fact that Sco set it so deftly in motion.
A Coin That Won’t Get Tossed
Recalling the John Scofield-Joe Lovano Quartet, I just looked up my NYT review of a reunion engagement at the Blue Note, from the fall of 2015. Re-sharing it here (gift link) even though the lede includes a glib political reference that makes me cringe. You’ll know it when you see it.
Last Thursday, I caught one of two farewell gigs by Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, at Solar Myth. Berne turned 70 this week, and what better gift than the terrific profile
wrote for the Times? Check this post on Hank’s Substack for more details about the piece, as well as his profile of Jack DeJohnette.Speaking of Jack and Sco: one of the best times I ever had in a studio was the afternoon I spent at NRS Recording in Catskill, as the supergroup known as Hudson was finishing its self-titled album. The band, also with John Medeski on organ and Larry Grenadier on bass, had already tracked most of what appears on the album, so this was mess-around time. Some of what they played was unbelievable — like, 25-minute funk drones of the highest order. I hope someday that material sees its way to release. In the meantime, a view from the board.
On the subject of Carla Bley, I’ve linked in the footnotes to her Times obit. If you are somewhat new to The Gig and haven’t seen my personal tribute, here it is.
Do you subscribe to The Late Set? I hope you do. Our new episode, out this week, features a conversation that Josh Jackson and I had in Pittsburgh with saxophonist Chris Coles and trumpeter Sean Jones, the morning after their powerful performance of Coles’ suite Nine Lives.
Thanks as always for reading The Gig! In a few days I’ll be at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York attending Jazz For Kamala, an all-star gala organized by pianist Aaron Goldberg, with Lovano, Ron Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Christian McBride and others. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but I’ll have more to say about that soon.
Scofield was born on Dec. 26, 1951, which means he was 24 throughout most of 1976. Which jazz legends were in their early 70s in our bicentennial year? I count only a handful, including Earl Hines, Count Basie, Doc Cheatham and Cie Frazier. Life expectancy is one area in which jazz musicians have made undeniable progress over the last 50 years.
“Mo Green” is not an explicit endorsement of the guy presently running for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, nor a nod to Morris “Moe” Greene, a coolly deadly figure in The Godfather. Scofield has explained that he wrote the tune based on a groove similar to his tune “Green Tea,” from the Medeski Martin & Wood collab A Go Go.
Can it really be a year since Carla Bley passed? I can’t decide whether it feels longer or shorter, but so it goes. Here is my NY Times obit (gift link).
I recently caught Vicente Archer with Peter Bernstein and Al Foster and his playing was just jaw dropping. Checked out an interview with Greg Bryant on YT afterwards that was really hip! Very cool to learn more about his background
Nice piece.
I heard the Scofield Quartet in Chicago in 1992. Insane that this was 32 years (!) ago and, worse, that I was already 29.
Loved that group. Always felt that sonically and conceptually, they offered an unusually broad, state-of-the-art summary of the mainstream — they might swing intensely over Rhythm or Honeysuckle Rose changes for 20 minutes, with Irwin’s gut-string pulse connecting to hard bop and Stewart evoking the lithe flexibility of early Tony; or they could stretch out modally or lay into a fusiony backbeat with Scofield’s idiomatic guitar sound and Stewart anchoring the vibe—but with the acoustic bass keeping a window open to the core tradition. Also, this might be my favorite Lovano—loose but still digging into the beat, not as blurry as he would become.
Anyway, onward.