John Scofield, Dave Holland

LP version. Memories of Home is the first duo album by guitarist John Scofield and bassist Dave Holland, two players whose paths have crossed for three decades. Made after years of touring together as a duo, it gathers nine originals, five by Scofield and four by Holland, most of them revisited from earlier records. Electric guitar and double bass carry the whole programme, and the music relies on the conversation between two long, shared vocabularies.

The two played together in Herbie Hancock's band for The New Standard (1996) and later in ScoLoHoFo, the co-led quartet with Joe Lovano and Al Foster. As a duo they recorded at NRS Recording Studio in Catskill, New York, in August 2024, with Scott Petito as engineer. Scofield and Holland produced the album themselves for ECM, Holland's label home since the early 1970s. "We share decades of common references musically," Scofield said, adding that the similarities and differences in their approaches make the collaboration more interesting. The record follows the shape of their live shows, mixing new and old tunes.

Scofield's Icons at the Fair opens the set with a new melody written over the chords of Hancock's arrangement of Scarborough Fair on The New Standard. Holland's Mr. B, first heard on his ECM album Points of View (1998), is a bluesy tribute to the bassist Ray Brown. The title piece, also by Holland, comes from an earlier meeting with bluegrass musicians and closes the record with a country lilt, Scofield bending notes more than usual. Elsewhere You I Love rewrites the chords of Cole Porter's I Love You, and Mine Are Blues appears here on record for the first time.

Critics heard the restraint as a strength. Writing in The Arts Fuse (2025), Steve Elman called it "intimate music, but it remains rich with detail and depth", and praised the way Holland's bass is caught on the recording. Jim Hynes of Post Genre described the album as a studio extension of their touring partnership and wrote: "Their chemistry could not be any tighter." The longest track, Scofield's Easy for You, was for Hynes the most compelling.

This is the LP edition of ECM 2860, released in November 2025.