Despite being associated with
ECM for decades as a collaborator and sideman, it's surprising that
Uncle John's Band is only the third leader date for guitarist
John Scofield. Over two discs and 14 tracks,
Scofield and his longstanding trio -- double bassist
Vicente Archer and drummer
Bill Stewart -- reflect their performing persona rather than their recording one. Live, they let the music they play determine their direction, not a set list.
Scofield penned half these tracks and they're sequenced among cover versions of iconic folk, rock, jazz, and show tunes.
A case for the latter is the set opener, a reading of
Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man."
Scofield kicks it off in droning Indian raga style, using his leads above modal chords as
Stewart's cymbals and bells and
Archer's guiding bassline add ballast. "TV Band" a strutting, swaggering post-bop funk jam. The guitarist and bassist unfold the progression and follow the verse melody before opening a delicate, lyrical improvisation in the guitar solo. "How Deep" is a 32-bar bop tune that swings hard amid arpeggiated solos and fours traded among string players. "Back in Time" openly cross-references "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "Greensleeves," and "Scarborough Fair" amid its dark Americana tempered with blues.
Miles Davis' "Budo" (essentially a
Bud Powell tune with a bridge) is rendered as modern bebop and swings like mad. "Nothing Is Forever" is introduced by
Archer and
Stewart before the guitarist layers silvery chord voicings in a syncopated progression that kisses blues, bossa, and post-bop atop the rhythm section's lithe groove. The disc closer is a fleet, rockist reading of
Neil Young's "Old Man." With the electric guitar taking the place of a human voice as the lyric instrument,
Scofield makes limpid changes to harmony, color, texture, and tempo, moving the proceeding from pop song into exploratory, post-bop in his solo. The trio returns to swing out the melody in closing.
Disc two offers truly moving readings of standards "Stairway to the Stars," a pop ballad from the late 1930s, and
Leonard Bernstein and
Stephen Sondheim's
West Side Story theme "Somewhere." There isn't a nostalgic note in the trio's graceful presentations of these songs -- they offer sparse phrasing, lush, graceful lyricism, a spectral rhythmic pulse, and spacy atmospherics. "Mo Green," an original, sways and slips across NOLA-styled R&B (thanks to
Stewart's canny drumming), soul-jazz, and Latin grooves. The title-track set closer is a cover of the iconic
Grateful Dead tune that opened 1970's
Workingman's Dead.
Scofield's fingerpicking of the simple melody is striking; it captures the softer side of
Dead guitarist
Jerry Garcia's complex musical personality. The trio use the tune's melody to quote and weave in luminous threads from country, folk, bluegrass, and children's nursery rhymes. They add rhythmic complexity to stretch parameters as
Scofield traces then extends harmonic invention via modern jazz. Though
Scofield's recordings are always high quality,
Uncle John's Band captures this trio's spontaneity, magic, and risk-taking in a recording studio for the very first time. ~ Thom Jurek
