Nearly two decades before COVID-19 was even a twinkle in a pangolin’s eye—if in fact those endearing critters had any coronavirus connection at all—John Scofield was already messing around with looping devices to, as he puts it, “extend the sound” of his guitar. Specifically, he was playing with an early example of such gadgets, the Boomerang Phrase Sampler Plus, beginning around 2001 while working with the band that made the following year’s Überjam (saxophonist/flutist Karl Denson, keyboardist John Medeski, guitarist Avi Bortnick, bassist Jesse Murphy, and drummer Adam Deitch).
“I used it really for effects back then,” he recalls via Zoom from his home in Westchester County, about an hour north of New York City. “Not so much for looping, just for sonic stuff that I would throw in. Then I just had it for years and I’d play with it at home, so I got very comfortable with it.”
So comfortable that, shortly before the ’rona went global, Scofield played a few one-man shows with the looper. The ability it gave him to put a riff or chord progression on infinite repeat and, effectively, accompany himself would soon prove important, and when the world went on lockdown in the spring of 2020, he turned to his trusty Boomerang. This sparked months of musical investigation and experiment, some of which can now be heard on the simply and aptly titled John Scofield (ECM), the vaunted guitarist’s first-ever solo record, some of which features looping and some of which is literally solo.
I’ll throw the journalistic objectivity out the window right now and tell you that I think it’s a marvelous album, a riot of brilliant ideas executed in a manner so direct and personal that you immediately know not just that it’s Sco but that it could be no one else.
also—like both the repertoire of the Yankee Go Home band with which its 70-year-old maker is touring the world this year and the interview presented below—is something of a trip down memory lane, reassessing old melodies, reframing past experiences, recounting favorite tales. Yet what Scofield finds in that rich history,
