John Scofield – Revealing The Birth of Sco-Mule (INTERVIEW)

One of the pre-eminent guitarists of contemporary jazz, John Scofield brings an unassuming enthusiasm, not to mention palpable pride, to everything he does. Whether he’s playing in the cozy (but ultimately expansive) realm of a trio with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Bill Stewart, paying tribute to Ray Charles or experimenting with horns, leading his Uberjam Band or nurturing his abiding relationship with Medeski Martin and Wood (on stage and in the recording studio); Scofield is an engaged and gracious participant…just as he is in this conversation with Doug Collette.

Mainly focusing on the project imminently at hand, a tour with Gov’t Mule to celebrate the release of Sco-Mule, Scofield also offers insight and observation on his relationship with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh (the friendship with whom was initiated by Mule’s titular leader Warren Haynes) and the concept of musical dynamics in general. It’s little wonder that musicians who’ve once worked with John Scofield, choose to work with him again (and again…and again): he is continuously in a process of simultaneous rediscovery and reinvention of himself and he is happily willing to share.

Thanks for taking time to chat with me about the project with Gov’t Mule Sco-Mule.

Glad you’re writing about it. There seems to be a buzz around it.

Well, it’s an unusual pairing, perhaps, that, at least based on my hearing, works from start to finish. Is that how you guys felt about it at the time and going back to it?

I do and I did. I’m looking forward to doing it again with those guys.

I wanted to move along the timeline with you, if you don’t mind, both on the original project and also this new one. Back in 1999, or earlier (whatever it was), how did you come to meet with Warren Haynes and Gov’t Mule?

I first met Warren—and it’s a funny story—when I was playing with Joe Lovano, Dennis Irwin and Bill Stewart in my quartet, which probably would’ve been ’90 or’91, perhaps ’92, but definitely turn of the decade: we used to play a lot at a place called Sweet Basil’s in New York city. One night this guy comes up to me and I remember thinking “Wow, this guy looks like a real Hell’s Angel!?”…leather jacket and shoulder length hair…

(laughs) Yeah Warren did look like that back then.

It wasn’t like your normal jazz club person…And I’m just hanging out there between sets and he goes “Hey man, any jammin’ here?…Any sittin’ in goin’ on?” I was like “No, not really” (laughs)—I didn’t know who he was but then we started to talk and I said “We don’t usually do that with this group; where are you from?” And he said “North Carolina—I play in The Allman Brothers” And I said “Holy s^&t! That’s great” I hadn’t been following the Allman Brothers at that point. And then we became friends.

So, that would’ve been right around the time he (Haynes) joined the band: when ABB regrouped in 1989, he was part of the lineup and Allen Woody joined at that time as well.

At that point I was pretty cutoff from the Allman Brothers world…

Well you weren’t alone there!

Yeah, it wasn’t like it came to be with month long runs at the Beacon (Theatre in New York), but we started talking and we had a friendly thing. Then flash ahead…we had been in touch a little bit over the next five years or so, around that time, at the end of the decade, Warren said “I’m putting your name in with Phil Lesh & Friends because Phil wants to meet you.” So Warren hooked me up with Phil Lesh. Long before I ever played my first gig with Phil Lesh, I went and played with him for a couple days out west in Marin County and that was something Warren hooked up, though I don’t remember exactly what year that was, it was before the Sco-Mule gigs in ’99. Then that happened and we were in touch because, it turns out, Warren dug my playing. He had my earlier records and there was one record he said he liked called Pick Hits Live (Gramavision) which was a record I made in the Eighties and so then he called me up to do the thing with Mule in 1999.

He called me up and said “I want you to come down and play a couple gigs with the band.” I flew down to Atlanta and he had a list of tunes he thought would work that we ended up playing as the repertoire, like my tune “Hottentot,” from A Go Go (with MMW in 1998).

You anticipated one of my questions,–which is how did you guys prep for those shows?—but before that, you informally jammed with Phil and some people at Warren’s introduction?

Warren was already doing Phil and Friends in almost its first version and there were some dates he couldn’t do with Phil, so Phil brought me out to Marin and we played in the studio for two days with drummer John Molo and the keyboard player at the time Rob Barraco. And there was another guitar player I didn’t know and another keyboard player I wish I could remember, but Phil was just trying different guys. And then I didn’t end up playing with Phil until, like, five years later!?

I have a musician friend who compliments Warren Haynes about being a great table setter: he knows musical history and he knows how to put people together. So that story you just told is a great illustration of that.

Warren is a really great bandleader and putting together different things, he’s very expansive in his musical taste and musical knowledge. He knows all about bluegrass and classical and Indian music…and jazz.

I don’t know how he gets a chance to listen to anything, given how often and regularly he plays…

(laughs) I know it! I don’t know how he does it because he does more projects than any one I’ve ever met!

He must be one of those people who sleeps only three or four hours a day if that. Let’s go back to prepping for those original Sco-Mule shows; so Warren had a list of songs he was suggesting?–were there additions or deletions by you or the other band members along the way?

It’s too long ago for me to remember exactly, but I do recall I knew some of the tunes. Like I knew the Wayne Shorter tune (“Tom Thumb”) because I had recorded it on a Blue Note sampler record: (keyboardist) Larry Goldings and I had gone in and recorded it. I knew “Afro Blue” from John Coltrane. I kinda knew “Pass the Peas” and “Doin’ It to Death” from James Brown’s band, so I knew them or knew of them, so I could jump right in.

I bet Warren knew you knew all those tunes, including Shorter’s…

I was really surprised he knew that as it’s certainly not part of the Southern rock (approach).

No, it isn’t but I remember when I first discovered Warren Haynes and Gov’t Mule, I read an interview with him where he was talking bout his favorite bands of all time and one of the band’s he mentioned being so enamored of was The Miles Davis Quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter Ron Carter and Tony Williams, so I remember thinking “This guy’s taste is right along the same lines as mine, I gotta pay closer attention to him!” Did you put together very structured arrangements for these tunes? …it doesn’t really sound like it, but you’ve gotta have start and stop places.

No, we didn’t…I haven’t listened in a while, but we just played the tunes kind of the way they were on the original records—Warren may have made some changes–but they came out real differently because, the way those guys approach music is different than a straight-ahead jazz way: they’re coming from this loud electric place. And when I say loud, I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all – they rock out like a a big rock band that plays big venues. You just get used to what they do…like what the drummer does: Matt Abts plays rock and roll drums-it’s powerful! And Warren goes through his Marshall stack and the bassist has two SVT’s?. And that’s a beautiful thing that happens with that kind of music where it’s really freakin’ powerful and it’s made for big stages. And that does something for jazz music when you play it through those instruments- that changes it a lot.

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If it doesn’t sound like a dumb question what’s the biggest change that it makes?

It’s louder and heavier. That’s the only thing I can say. So it changes the music, but then it takes on a new character that’s interesting. I was never a jazz purist: I started out playing blues and rock and I played in loud bands from the beginning. And Miles Davis band was really loud. So that wasn’t foreign territory to me. But that’s what made the change in the music for me to make “Afro Blue” and “Tom Thumb” really pretty different from the original versions: -something happens when it gets heavy.

Well, that’s what Warren and Allen Woody were after when they formed Gov’t Mule, as I understand it. They worked together in the Allman Brothers and got to know each other and in comparing tastes, wanted to put together a group along the lines of the great power trios like Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. And certainly when you listen to the early Mule, their live stuff, they just go for it. They love to play together and the two of them were on the same plane with Abts, so they can go in and out of tunes seemingly endlessly. It’s music so loud it washes over you…

They really are a unit way into doing a lot of different music and a lot of different tunes. It’s very cool.

Let’s skip ahead to present day, but only after one more question about that time. You had just put out the record with Medeski Martin and Wood, so you must’ve been in a real frame of mind to stretch out and try some different things. Not that you hadn’t before…

That was when I started to get in with the jamband scene. It all kind of happened at once, but yeah, the first thing would’ve been playing with MMW the year before and then I was on that path. But then I already knew Warren and he hooked me up with Phil and then this happened with Gov’t Mule. Maybe he heard “Hottentot” and thought “Well, he’s on the same page we are!?”

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Quite possibly. Warren’s quite discerning like that…

Yeah, he is!

So skipping ahead to present day, from your point of view, how did the Sco-Mule project come back to life? How did you find out Warren and Mule wanted to put that out again and go out on the road to support it?

Well, for Gov’t Mule, unfortunately everything came crashing down when Allen Woody died, really not so long after we did that thing (together).

Right: Woody died the next year (2000)…

Right…so there had already been talk, before Woody died, “Well maybe we’ll get back together?” And Warren had made these recordings of the gigs, so there was some talk that at some point we might want to do something with that and play some more. Then Allen died, but the tapes of those gigs stayed around in the taper community; people would come up to me every year or so and say “Hey man we’ve got the Sco-Mule!” They were even calling it “Sco-Mule” already. People were making CDs of it and passing it around and at some point, someone gave me a CD with a nice little cover that read “Sco-Mule from Athens”—the whole show?! It was out there ,so people knew about the music in the jamband world, then a few years after Woody died and things settled for Gov’t Mule, Warren said “You know we should put out those tapes: they’re really good!” And then a few more years would go by and Warren would say “You know we should put out those tapes: they’re really good!” (laughs) “Yeah, let’s do that!” Now it finally happened and it took this long because Warren’s busy, we’re all busy doing different things. And now it finally happened and we’re putting it out and doing a tour.

Based on a couple interviews I saw toward the end of last year, the twentieth anniversary of Gov’t Mule really seemed to spark an initiative to release things like the Sco-Mule shows, for posterity’s sake because such things are an important part of the early days of Gov’t Mule. Even now, they’re a band that goes back and forth with their repertoire, so it only makes sense they would select things that were so important to them and so important to people – it obviously struck a chord.

When you heard the tapes again, what was your reaction?

Well. I’ve heard them, but I haven’t’ studied them and I have to because we’re going out on the road in a week or so (laughs). I was fearing that, from fifteen years ago, maybe it’s not that good and then I put it on and thought “Damn! It is pretty good!”

Yeah, you guys are clearly enjoying yourselves, but more importantly, inspiring each other coming up with ideas right and left—and anticipating each other: that’s rare in itself. How much prep have you done for the upcoming shows at this point?

We haven’t done any prep. Warren just sent me a list of fifty tunes (laughs) that he would like to do on the tour, so I’ve got some homework to get together here. And I gave him a bunch of names of my old tunes, so out of all those, we won’t end up playing all of them, but we’re going to play different tunes every night, then play the tunes from the record and we’re doing to each learn on our own, then meet for one rehearsal before our first show in Seattle.

How long is the rehearsal going to last: all day or as long as it needs to?

It’ll be a day long…

May I ask what your reaction was when you played with the current Mule lineup including Jorgen Carlsson (bass) and Danny Louis (keyboards) and how different it was than with Woody and (keyboardist) Dr. Dan Matrazzo who played with you on those first dates?

It’s funny. First of all, music is so ephemeral. I don’t remember analyzing it because when you’re up there playing it, you just get the input from the other people and make it work. I do remember thinking of playing with Danny on The Deep End and then I remember a gig I played with Mule where I sat in, so I knew he was good. Turns out we actually went to Berklee (School of Music in Boston) at the same time, way back when. And we weren’t friends but we kind of knew each other. And I remember I hadn’t played with Jorgen, but I knew he was really good…and he played with a pick and it was really clear. But every time I play with these guys, the way he and Matt play together, I realize this is a really ROCK rhythm section and it is fun—it’s really fun.

The 2015 Sco-Mule Winter Tour kicked off Wednesday night 2/18 in Seattle, check the band’s website for current tour dates

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2 Responses

  1. I love the song Still Warm,the guitar work on that is silky. As a guitar player I like to
    explore nuances of the music. Working with other artists,expands your awareness.
    That’s what you do,when you live in the creative world.

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