This month John Wheatcroft investigates the playing of a true contemporary jazz great who mixes bluesy-rock tone with sophisticated harmony and dazzling technique.
With a career that spans almost five decades, John Scofield’s style has continued to evolve, encapsulating the best elements from jazz, rock, blues, funk and soul, to create a sound that is ever developing but which always sounds unmistakably like ‘Sco’.
John picked up his first guitar aged 11, and started off by learning the hits of the day from the radio. By his early teens he developed a keen interest in rock and blues guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and BB King, influences that can still be clearly discerned in his playing to this day. But by the time he reached 16 Scofield was a fully-fledged jazzer, with a small but intelligently selected record collection that included legendary guitarists such as George Benson and Pat Martino, along with classic jazz and bepop artists including Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Scofield attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music and, by his own admission, had to really work hard to make the progress that he desired. This determination and focus has remained consistent throughout his career, with a constant drive to remain fresh, current and cutting-edge.
After graduating, John came to the attention of drummer Billy Cobham, with a band that included both Michael and Randy Brecker. This in turn led to work with a host of notable artists such as George Duke, Stan Getz and Chet Baker.
Scofield’s big break came when saxophonist Bill Evans suggested him to trumpeter Miles Davis, working alongside the equally amazing guitarist Mike Stern on the road and performing on the albums Star People, You’re Under Arrest and Decoy. But it was inevitable that John would go solo, and for almost 40 years Scofield has enjoyed a remarkably successful career as a bandleader and composer, with an extensive portfolio of releases in a wide variety of styles and contexts.
John’s note selection is impeccable, with intelligent melodic choices, and lines that effortlessly weave through even the most complex changes. He has a remarkable sense of balance in terms of consonance and dissonance, blending stable inside notes with outside chromatic decorative tensions and embellishments, in a completely convincing and compelling way. One melodic option that John and his fellow jazz, fusion and modern blues contemporaries like to utilise is the Half-Whole symmetrical scale, the second mode of the Diminished scale which is usually built from a combination of alternating whole (two-fret) and half-step (one-fret) leaps. This second permutation flips the pattern around in a chain of Tone-Semitone-Tone-Semitone jumps until reaching the octave (R-b2-#9-3 #4-5-6-b7), providing us with a total of eight notes (C-Db-D#-E-F#-G-A-Bb) and giving us a huge range
