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JOHN SCOFIELD TRIO
CHECK MATES

For their last show in 19 years at the Regattabar, Fenton Hollander and his Water Music production company went out in style. They had booked the supergroup John Scofield Trio for June 14 and 15 long before they knew that this season would be their last at the Charles Hotel club, but they couldn’t have asked for a better send-off. Scofield, a former Berklee-ite, is one of the grandmasters of what critic Ben Ratliff has called Boston’s "chess club" guitar scene. Although his "überjam" band (informally named for its first album) offers its own pleasures, the trio — with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Bill Stewart — is manna for the straight-ahead jazz fan.

Scofield combines the chess-champ braininess of his solos with a taste for standard song forms and expansive bursts of volume. Among the more familiar numbers in the late Tuesday-night set, the band played the Sonny Rollins–associated novelty "Mangos" as well as "When Sonny Gets Blue" (with an extended deadpan intro by Scofield that made Swallow the butt of the joke). But even on chestnuts like these, Scofield builds his solos in oddly shaped patterns that shift in attack from phrase to phrase — a triplet-based ascending boppish line broken up with double- and triple-time machine-gun bursts, full-chord thumb strokes, and out-there clusters. If you could call even one guitar lick in his set familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard Scofield — and no one else — play it before.

Scofield’s cubist sense of phrasing can be frustrating: you can find yourself on the edge of your seat waiting for a standard cadence, and the guitarist himself is sometimes drawn onto his toes, staggering forward as he once again defers resolution. But Swallow’s subsonic throb walks with gravitational pull spelling out the progressions, and Stewart is like some frightening combination of Elvin Jones looseness and Tony Williams on-the-beat ferocity. At his most cohesive, Scofield plays hide-and-seek with melody. On the beautifully understated paraphrase of "When Sonny Gets Blue," he alternated phrases in the high and low register, riffing with himself. On the extremely fast "Travel John," he pulled everything together, always keeping the tune in sight as he went off in a million directions at once at warp speed, concluding with some fanned power chords.

The band probably had the most fun on an untitled New Orleans shuffle, Stewart and Swallow laying into multiple variations of the parade beat while Scofield wailed on his wah-wah pedal. When it was time for Stewart to take one of his stunning solos, Scofield and Swallow stood at either side of him, coming in together with a big chord at the top of each chorus, otherwise content to watch and smile.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: June 25 - July 1, 2004
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