John Fordham 

John Scofield/Medeski, Martin & Wood: Juice review – an elevated pub band with an accessible repertoire

The guitarist and the organ trio reunite for some jazz-bent rock covers, writes John Fordham
  
  

John Scofield John Medeski
New lineup … John Scofield (third from left) with Medeski, Martin & Wood Photograph: PR

Those enamoured of the gag about rock guitarists playing three chords to thousands of people and jazz guitarists thousands of chords to three people have to call it quits when it comes to John Scofield, a multi-chordal jazz guitarist who can nonetheless put all the blues slurs and bottleneck-shiver effects a rocker could ever want into the sound of just one. Scofield has been a thrilling jazz-improvising soloist over the years, and a sophisticated composer too, but Juice is another jam-band reunion with the Medeski, Martin & Wood organ trio, and they play a very accessible repertoire of hooky originals and jazz-bent Dylan, Doors and Cream hits here with the uncomplicated elan of an elevated pub band. Right from the off, Scofield fires off a wonderful, impulsively twisting solo on Eddie Harris’s rolling Sham Time, and if Light My Fire and The Times They Are a-Changin’ leave them slightly flummoxed about whether to be respectful or experimental, Medeski’s chomping Hammond sound against Scofield at his jazziest on the Cuban-flavoured Stovetop is exhilarating. Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love gets reinvented as an echoey, trance-like, spontaneous ska shuffle, and Scofield’s free-flowing rocker North London is like a post-bop Steely Dan tune. Turn it all up to 11.

 

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