Marc Johnson, Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Peter Erskine

Bass Desires is the first album Marc Johnson made as a leader, a quartet record that a bassist built around two guitarists. He set two very different players side by side, Bill Frisell and John Scofield, with Peter Erskine on drums, and built the music on their contrast. The leader was the first to say so: the debut, Johnson insisted, "was really about the two guitarists".

Johnson had come to wider notice in the last trio of Bill Evans, with whom he spent two years up to the pianist's death. Jazz Journal's reviewer had heard an early version of the band in a Manhattan restaurant at Christmas 1983, with John Abercrombie in the second guitar chair later taken by Frisell. The album was recorded in May 1985 at the Power Station in New York, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher. Frisell plays guitar and guitar synthesizer, Scofield guitar, and Johnson wrote two of the seven pieces.

Frisell brings swathes of sound and unexpected sonic twists, Scofield a grittier urban jazz-blues voice, and the two lines keep interlocking instead of simply taking turns. Coltrane's Resolution, from A Love Supreme, opens with a brief bass introduction and stretches past ten minutes, with room for an Erskine solo over the two guitars. The traditional Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair rests on sonorous bass ostinati, while Johnson's Mojo Highway rides a reggae beat. Erskine contributed the swinging title track, Scofield the closing Thanks Again, and a theme by Elmer Bernstein and Mack David, A Wishing Doll, sits in the middle.

Reviewing the record for Jazz Journal in August 1986, Mark Gilbert heard swing, blues, reggae, folk and country. He called it "fusion all right, but in its broadest sense, suitably stripped of excess". He set "Frisell's swelling symphonic style" against Scofield's "more abrasive, direct" playing. Years later Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews counted the opener, Samurai Hee-Haw, among the most memorable cuts in the label's catalogue. The same quartet returned to the studio in March 1987 for Second Sight, issued as Marc Johnson's Bass Desires.

This CD belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the label's back catalogue back into print in card sleeves. ECM 1299, first released in 1986, this edition 2008.