![]() I didn’t have a home studio, but I bought the Universal Audio OX, which is a machine that allows you to get the sound of your amp and then it does speaker and microphone modeling. How did you go about recording the album? And part of the reason I don’t like that stuff is that it’s un-jazzlike. Otherwise the temptation would be to make tracks to play along with, which is the way the world is now. So I think that helps me to keep it more in the moment. You can do one loop and then you got that one for your performance, but then the next time you want to make a loop, the first one goes away and you got a new one. And because it’s one of the early loopers, the good thing-or the bad thing-about it is you cannot store loops. And it’s another thing to play solo guitar like the great Ted Greene: He played fantastic, but it was mainly reharmonizing and doing stuff around the melodies, it wasn’t like improvising in that way.īut as soon as I started to do stuff with the looper, I realized I could do it. It’s so hard to do, to play in the style of, like, blowing over the tune, which is basically what I do. As far as jazz is concerned, I’m not a big solo guitar fan. With a group you get a momentum going, and I’m used to that. You know, I sort of thought about it, but the idea of going into a recording studio by myself, meeting the engineer and then sitting there trying to play something for six hours-it just sounded intimidating. I never considered myself a solo guitarist, not to the extent that I wanted to record solo. JOHN SCOFIELD: It probably never would have happened without the pandemic. JT: I find it hard to believe that you’d never even considered making a solo album before 2020. Yet what Scofield finds in that rich history, both as a player and as a talker, always comes out fresh. John Scofield 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. 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. 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. 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. So comfortable that, shortly before the ’rona went global, Scofield played a few one-man shows with the looper. Then I just had it for years and I’d play with it at home, so I got very comfortable with it.” “Not so much for looping, just for sonic stuff that I would throw in. ![]() “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. 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). 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.
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