Sober Scofield prefers to get high on the music

With titles like "Cachaí§a", "Tequila and Chocolate", and "Legalize It", there must have been a party going on during the making of Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood's Out Louder. If there was, though, it's a sure bet that John Scofield, the senior member of the impromptu quartet, wasn't imbibing.

"I stopped getting high 10 years ago, so it's not me that's coming up with those titles," reports the affable guitarist, reached at home in Connecticut. "I don't tell people what to do, though, and I wouldn't trade my experience of the different psychedelics and getting drunk and everything. It was a blast, you know–but I had to stop."

Sobriety didn't interfere with Scofield's having a good time during the sessions, which were recorded at his younger partners' Brooklyn studio and mixed by Vancouver expat Scotty Hard. In fact, the self-described "older brother" of keyboardist John Medeski, drummer Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood says that recording Out Louder–his second collaboration with the MM&W crew–was an exceptionally easygoing undertaking.

"We rehearsed a little bit, and then I said, 'Let's play free and see what happens,'" Scofield reveals. "Well, the first tune was 45 minutes long, and it was really good!"

So good, in fact, that the musicians decided to release the first movement of their extended improvisation in its entirety. With squawking auto-wah guitar and stormy Hammond draped over a Bootsylicious bass line and second-line-strutting drums, "Down the Tube" is 12 minutes of unedited fun–and it's not the only improv-spawned number to surface on Out Louder. Having found their feet, Scofield explains, the four musicians started mining their freeform creation for material that could be developed further.

"Another three or four of the tunes are like that, where we used the feeling of some of those free things but made them a little more into tunes."

One of those tunes, "Miles Behind", is an overt and effective nod to the electric jazz Miles Davis invented during the 1960s, so it's easy to surmise that Scofield and his accomplices were also paying homage to famed producer Teo Macero, who's often credited with assembling Davis's Bitches Brew from snippets of abstract jamming. Having spent time with both Davis and Macero, the guitarist has a slightly different view of who's being emulated.

"People say it's the Teo Macero method, but I think it's the Miles method," he stresses. "This is not to take away from Teo, but when I worked with Miles, he told Teo what to pick. He said, 'Okay, take this bass solo, and take my trumpet from this tune”¦' And he did it over the phone, but he did go back and listen to all the stuff. I don't know if that's what they did on Bitches Brew or not, but that's the way it was on the record I made with them, Star People."

Building sophisticated structures out of simple jams might be an unusual way to work, but the evidence is that it works.

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood play the Commodore Ballroom tonight (September 13).

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