John Scofield

CD version. Uncle John's Band is a double album by the trio of guitarist John Scofield with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Bill Stewart, released by ECM Records in October 2023. Named after the Grateful Dead song that closes it, the set pairs seven Scofield originals with seven pieces by others, from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to bebop and the American songbook. It is Scofield's third album as a leader for ECM, after Swallow Tales and his solo record John Scofield.

The trio recorded in August 2022 at Clubhouse Studio in Rhinebeck, New York, with Tyler McDiarmid as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer, who also mixed and sequenced the album. Stewart has played with Scofield on and off since the early 1990s. Archer took over the bass chair that Steve Swallow held on Swallow Tales in 2020. Scofield wrote the liner notes, commenting on each track, and sums up the group in one line: "I feel like we can go anywhere."

The opener sets the terms. On Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man a looped guitar figure hums like a drone, Archer plays almost percussively, and the familiar melody surfaces only about two minutes in. From there the trio opens the tune into nine minutes of collective improvisation. Among the originals, the funk-laced Mo Green borrows the feel, in Scofield's own words, of his earlier tune Green Tea. Leonard Bernstein's Somewhere is taken slowly, with Archer at the centre. Elsewhere the program runs from the Bud Powell and Miles Davis line Budo and Ray Brown's Ray's Idea to Neil Young's Old Man. Scofield's own tunes move between swing, funk and folk.

In The Guardian, John Fordham called it "an artfully hip trio set" and praised the laconic lyricism of the originals. Writing for All About Jazz, Ian Patterson heard in the ballads Stairway to the Stars and Somewhere evidence that Scofield is "as good a balladeer as any out there". Several reviewers, Thom Jurek at AllMusic among them, observed that the record catches the spontaneity and risk-taking of this trio in a studio for the first time.

This is the double CD edition on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 2796/97, released on 13 October 2023, with Scofield's track-by-track notes in English.