John Scofield

LP version. Uncle John's Band is a double album by the trio of John Scofield with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Bill Stewart, released by ECM in October 2023. It takes its title from the Grateful Dead song that closes the set. Fourteen pieces, seven Scofield originals and seven covers, move from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to bebop and the American songbook, and the trio's improvising holds them together as one programme.

It was Scofield's third ECM album as a leader, after Swallow Tales (2020), a trio date with Steve Swallow and Stewart, and the solo guitar record John Scofield (2022). Archer had taken over the bass chair from Swallow in recent years, while Stewart has played with Scofield on and off since the early 1990s. The album was recorded in August 2022 at Clubhouse Studio in Rhinebeck, New York, with Tyler McDiarmid engineering and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. In his own liner notes Scofield sums up the group in one line: "I feel like we can go anywhere."

Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man opens the set at over nine minutes. Guitar loops hum under a hovering, raga-like introduction until, almost two minutes in, the melody surfaces and the trio opens it up in collective improvisation. Among the originals, Mo Green reworks Scofield's earlier Green Tea as a funk-laced romp, while Back in Time has a folk lilt with echoes of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. The ballads slow things down: Stairway to the Stars and Leonard Bernstein's Somewhere, the latter carried by Archer's bass. The bop side comes through in Budo, from the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions, and in Ray Brown's Ray's Idea.

Critics heard the range as a single voice rather than a survey. In All About Jazz Ian Patterson wrote that "the bridges between '40s bebop and contemporary improvisation or between '60s folk and wicked groove-based romps are smooth". Thomas Conrad in Stereophile (November 2023) found it "revelatory to hear him render 'Mr. Tambourine Man' in his 21st century-jazz guitar language". Jazzwise made the album one of its Editor's Choices.

This edition is the double LP in a gatefold sleeve, ECM 2796/97, first released in 2023. The same recording is also issued on two CDs.