JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
Rating: 
Coming right smack in the middle of his richly productive tenure with the Gramavision label, John Scofield’s Blue Matter is his funkiest, most hardcore fusion release.
Since the 90s at least, Scofield has been inclined to hold back in his compositions and playing, practicing restraint to generate tension, concentrate on groove, and experiment with tonality, both on guitar and in his arrangements.
On Blue Matter, Scofield takes no prisoners, unleashing the full force of his post bop guitar stylings with searing blues licks and blistering runs. By this time, Scofield had perfected a fat juicy fusion sound. He sounds like he’s having a blast.
The rest of the band keeps up with him. The rhythm section of Gary Grainger (bass) and Dennis Chambers (drums) is especially aggressive. Grainger pops like a madman, but always with taste. With Chambers, it’s all about maintaining a propulsive groove, no matter how complex the metric subdivisions of the song forms get. Mitchell Forman (keys) mostly serves to fatten up the sound, but when he does get a solo, his elegance contrasts nicely with Scofield’s fire. Don Alias is recorded with some echo on his percussion, making his contribution particularly steamy in this context.
The songs, all Scofield originals, are predictably excellent–he was on a roll in those days–but The Nag stands out. An uptempo number, this is the only purely programmatic tune I know of that Scofield has written. After the theme is stated, the band locks into an uptempo groove centering on a chromatic repeating descending bass pattern based on only three notes, over which Scofield runs riot. In between solos, he doubles the pattern Grainger is laying out on bass. During the last solo, Scofield slashes notes upwards, downwards and sideways, preternaturally evoking the scold of the song’s title. The first time I heard The Nag, I was laughing so hard, I missed half of it.
All I can say is, Scofield must have been drawing on personal experience when he wrote that tune.
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