Recently Heard: Still Warm by John Scofield

[ellyssian]

John Scofield: Still Warm

I'm listening to the first track of this - rewinding it, as it were - as I write this.

I first heard this one piece twenty years ago. I was just getting serious about the guitar, and this was one of the soundpages in Guitar Player magazine. I realize now how huge the impact of this piece was on my playing. The phrasing of the opening is what I picked up on. You don't have to play every second. I think I kept this in mind in a lot of the solos that I did over the years - some very fast bits, with a whole lot of rhythmic breaks, a concept I took even further when playing one of the Brecker's sax phrasing (on Mike Stern's first album) on the guitar. Very much a legato, a bunch of notes and then a breath - something you don't have to do. Something most guitarists don't take the time to do when they could be showing off with a quarter million notes in between.

True, this piece does pick up the pace, but the phrasing is there, even when the breaths are quick gasps. The tune builds, then goes back into more spacious phrasing.

Funny, how influential one person can be, without having heard more than the smallest fraction of that person's playing. John was a huge influence to me then, still is now that I've had this entire album for ten or so years.

There's some great guitar jazz on this - Don Grolnick's keys take more of a supporting role, but there's lots of good bass playing by Darryl Jones in a fairly prominent role, as well as excellent percussion work by Omar Hakim.