More of the same, plus a lot of that’s different from Scofield this time. The familiar aspect is his sterling work as a soloist, while one of the differences is that there’s much more of it. This is truly a blowing album, with Scofield’s rough diamond improvisations glittering in the spotlight, centre stage. Having raised a posse of saddle-hardened sidemen, the ex-Miles guitarist fires from the hip on some strong riffs and tunes, and the result is an album which is more cohesive, more direct and more simply convincing than Electric Outlet, his first solo project for Gramavision. Where Outlet was at times a little fussy, over-overdubbed and perhaps a touch contrived, Still Warm celebrates fundamental values. It has the zest of an impromptu live set, with Scofield hammering together the unchamfered offcuts of a good three decades of American music to form a solid platform for his own ideas.
It’s Jones’s bass which nails the whole thing together, and he turns the in-the-pocket riffs which Scofield has devised into heavy duty load-bearing struts. Hakim’s whipcrack snare and electric accessories drive the point home with an almost imperceptible urgency, while Grolnick is a strangely subdued foil to the leader’s assertive guitaring.
As ever, Scofield manages to surprise himself, not least when his train of thought threatens to run right off the rails towards the end of the soft country shuffle of Rule Of Thumb. Disaster is averted when he follows the sound principle of covering his (perhaps deliberate) mistake by doing the same thing again. Throughout, he follows the time-honoured jazz tradition of inspecting his material from all angles, scrutinising those slow, sustained notes for what seems an age.
Apart from being the best testimony yet to Scofield as improviser pure and simple, Still Warm is also misnamed. It’s actually Ruddy Hot. Mark Gilbert
Discography
Techno; Still Warm; High And Mighty; Protocol (22.03) — Rule Of Thumb; Picks + Pans; Gil b643 (19.26)
Scofield (g); Don Grolnick (kyb); Darryl Jones (b); Omar Hakim (d). Recorded NYC, June 1985.
(Gramavision 18-8508-1)