1 post tagged “john scofield”

I've liked Medeski Martin and Wood ever since I first heard them on the Get Shorty soundtrack (one of the grooviest soundtracks to a mainstream movie since the 70s), but I only ever got a couple of their albums.  One that I bought was their first album with guitarist John Scofield, issued under Scofield's name alone as A Go Go.  That came out in 1998, and MMW dropped off my radar after that.  Last week I decided to do some catching up, and got their second collaboration with Scofield, Out Louder from 2006, credited to all four of them this time.  I skipped forward to "Miles Behind," which I gathered was a play on Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and may be a tribute of sorts.  And it is a tribute: not to the late-50s-era Miles of Miles Ahead, but to my absolute favorite stretch of his career, the wildly creative funk-rock-jazz fusion of the early 70s, Bitches Brew through Get Up With It, so despised by jazz purists but beloved by many who, like me, approach music with rock as their baseline.  I first heard Miles's 1975 live album, Agharta, at the Tower Records (remember those?) in Rockville in 1991, and I bought it even though I was broke, because it was exactly the music I needed at the time.  "Miles Behind" nails the Electric Miles sound (albeit without a trumpet); it distills that entire oeuvre into less than three minutes, and reliving the rush of my initial Agharta revelation actually gave me goosebumps.