John Scofield - Blue Matter

Ok, so I'm driving home again after an annoying and tiring day at the office, where I also felt at one point like I had food poisoning from the onion soup at the vegetarian restaurant...I needed a cool kind of album to "chill out" on the way home.

I've got the windows down to enjoy some of the breeze of the fall night, as I slip in another of my favorite John Scofield albums - "Blue Matter" .
If "Still Warm" has a warmish texture to it, "Blue Matter" is a bit more cool and distanced, especially due to some of the seriously dated synthesizer sounds from Mitchell Forman - if there is one thing that seems to date an album more than anything else, it's the embarrassing synth sounds that are often used in many 70's and 80's recordings, in Fusion and modern Jazz in particular. Getting past that, this album still has some great tunes on it with a killer rhythm section in bassist Gary Grainger and super drummer Dennis Chambers.

I saw Dennis Chambers live once or twice, and he nearly stole the show the second time - he is such a powerful and funky drummer with an amazing groove, that I don't think anyone today can come near him in this niche, I mean he's like Steve Gadd, Billy Cobham, and Dave Weckl all in one, playing on amphetamines...

As I'm waiting for some of the congestion to clear up along the 2 1/2 lane boulevard that passes by the Yarkon river, I get a waft of the local sewage treatment station along the way - oh putrid!!! - gotta crank up the volume on "Now She's Blond" and try to ignore the olfactory affront. As I pass the Diamond Exchange business area, another waft of sewage comes up - you can also get that whnever you pass by the Sheraton City Tower on the highway heading north, it always seems to smell terrible around there, at least for the last 3-4 years...

I flip back to one of my favorites - "Blue Matter", the first track on this album and what originally sold me on it when I bought the fine German pressing of the LP around 20 years ago, and I used to sit with the album and try to pick out the tune on my own guitar.

Just a couple of years after that album came out, I managed to help persuade someone that it would be a good idea to have Scofield over here for a live concert or two, and I even got to meet my idol and get him to autograph my Ibanez guitar (a similar model to the one that he plays).

Cool, I've chilled out now...