John Scofield

CD version. After more than fifty years of recording, John Scofield made his first true solo guitar album only in 2021. It is also his second release for ECM, after the trio album Swallow Tales (2020). Alone with his electric guitar and a looper, he builds his own chordal backing and rhythmic pulse, then plays over it. The thirteen pieces range across the music he has lived with, from bebop standards to the rock and roll and country songs of his youth.

Scofield recorded the album in August 2021 at Top Story Studio in Katonah, New York, with Tyler McDiarmid as engineer. Christoph Stickel mastered it and Manfred Eicher is credited as executive producer. Much of the material had taken shape while he played alone at home during the pandemic, which he said had given him "a delicateness." The loops are made on the fly rather than prerecorded, so for long stretches the listener hears Scofield in duet with himself.

The opening take on Keith Jarrett's Coral holds back the melody until the very end. Five originals come from different points of his career. Honest I Do was first recorded with Bill Frisell on Grace Under Pressure, and Since You Asked dates from his work with Joe Lovano. The new Elder Dance is an off-kilter blues. Scofield pictures "older people (like me) doing a kind of lindy hop." Elsewhere come Danny Boy, the prison song Junco Partner, a foot-stamping Buddy Holly Not Fade Away and Hank Williams's You Win Again, played as a quiet close.

Critics heard the record as his most intimate. In The Times, Chris Pearson wrote that "this is one of those sets where you can hear the musician thinking." For Orlando Bird in The Daily Telegraph, it recalled the mood of Jarrett's solo album The Melody at Night, with You, with the closing Hank Williams song "serene as a sunset over the prairie." In Glide Magazine, Doug Collette noted that the quiet, close sound holds even when the looper is running.

CD edition, ECM 2727, released on 6 May 2022, with liner notes by Scofield in English and a cover photograph by Luciano Rossetti.