CD version. On Swallow Tales guitarist John Scofield plays nine compositions by his friend and mentor Steve Swallow, with the composer himself on bass. It was Scofield's first album as a leader for ECM. It is also a tribute to a writer whose tunes jazz musicians have played for decades, though his name is rarely cited among the great composers. The session was cut in a single day, "old school" style, as Scofield says.

Scofield was a 20-year-old student at Berklee when he first met and played with Swallow, and they have worked together ever since, including the guitarist's trio records of the 1980s. Behind the kit is Bill Stewart, a close associate of Scofield's since the early 1990s. The trio recorded in March 2019 at the James L. Dolan Recording Studio at NYU Steinhardt in New York, with Tyler McDiarmid as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. "Sometimes when we play it's like one big guitar, the bass part and my part together," Scofield says of his partnership with Swallow.

The selection spans classics such as Falling Grace, Eiderdown, Hullo Bolinas and Radio as well as lesser-known pieces. Both men play electric instruments, and Swallow's singing bass guitar is a full-bodied foil for Scofield's tart tone. The opening She Was Young, a waltz that Swallow first set to a poem by Robert Creeley, gets gritty, bent-string treatment from the guitarist. The nearly ten-minute Awful Coffee moves through spiky intervals and a shuffle swing, while Portsmouth Figurations floats freely before breaking into twangy, dissonant lines. Stewart, in Scofield's words, is "a melodic voice in the music, while also swinging really hard."

Reviewers welcomed the album as overdue recognition of Swallow the composer. Aaron Cohen wrote in DownBeat that some of these tunes date from the late 1970s, when Scofield was Swallow's protégé. In his view "time has served these pieces exceptionally well." Chris Pearson in The Times called it a set that rectifies "a 50-year oversight," noting that Swallow's tunes had been recorded by artists from Bill Evans to Pat Metheny. For Alison Bentley of London Jazz News the record is "completely engaging and immensely pleasurable."

CD edition, ECM 2679, released in June 2020, with liner notes by Scofield.