The jam-band epidemic claims another victim with ?berjam

There has always been improvised music. In the 20th century, this practice has come to be known as jazz.

A jazz musician is a unique sort of musician. He knows hundreds or thousands of songs by heart, can play them in any key and is a virtuoso of his instrument. He can even learn a song on the bandstand without the audience being aware. You can put a bunch of jazz musicians together who hav?e never met each other before, and they will still be able to make great music. The rare jazz musician can do this even without a written song or chart as a point of departure.

Lately, though, there are an increasing number of people who call themselves "jazz musicians" who cannot do any of this. They have no knowledge of the jazz tradition: they can't play the standards, they can't solo well, they rely on very detailed charts and they only play with their own groups. Rather than attempting to negotiate the jazz scene, these musicians travel under the moniker of "jam bands," playing to mostly-white college audiences who generally don't know the difference between them and actual jazz musicians.

Understanding this difference allows us to make a distinction between practitioners of "acid jazz," "trip hop," "fusion" or whatever other label one chooses to attach to the music. On one side are Medeski, Martin and Wood (MMR) - the ideal to which many jam bands aspire. All three members of MMW have extensive jazz backgrounds as well as experience in other genres. For example, MMW drummer Billy Martin played in a samba band for years, despite being the lone gringo. MMW uses a wide range of instruments and electronic props in performance, but they can also put on quite a show with just a piano, upright bass and trap kit - witness their 2000 live album Tonic. And all members can easily sit in with other bands and produce remarkable results.

On the other side there are bands like Soul-Live. The members of these groups have no grounding in the jazz tradition, can't improvise fluently and can't get away from their electronic and compositional crutches. Perhaps most tellingly, they don't play for black audiences. Yet they want to call themselves jazz musicians. Sometimes their records even end up in the jazz bins.

Placing the John Scofield Band in one of these categories is a little more difficult. After all, in the 1970s and 1980s, John Scofield was an up-and-coming jazz musician, collaborating with Miles Davis on the Grammy Award-winning 1983 album Decoy and two others. His rsum also includes stints with the likes of Charles Mingus, Joe Henderson, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.

But lately Scofield has been a victim of the jam band disease. He initiated this trajectory with his 1998 album A Go Go, with masters MMW as his rhythm section - and more than a little bit of borrowed credibility. Not even MMW could salvage this sad effort. Indeed, the few bright moments on the album occur when Scofield lays out and John Medeski takes a chorus or two on his B3 or clavinet.

Scofield embraced the jam band formula: unimaginative charts with little harmonic inventiveness, timid and tepid soloing, and a new love affair with electronics - the trademark Scofield sound of the RAT distortion pedal and chorus has been augmented by vibratos, delays, and most recently, a guitar synth. His 2000 album Bump provided more of the same, albeit with MMW bassist Chris Wood as the only external representative intermingled with a new band.

For ?berjam (Verve 314 589 356-2, 2002), Scofield has put together a new band of Avi Bortnick (guitars and sampler), Jesse Murphy (bass) and Adam Deitch (drums). John Medeski and Karl Denson (flute and sax) guest on a few tracks, too. Listening to the new album is like watching a patient in the advanced stages of Ebola infection. After a dormant period where things were not quite right, the patient is now hemorrhaging profusely, spilling blood and bile from every orifice. Indeed, every symptom of Scofield's jam band disease has reached full expression.

For starters, this is perhaps the most aggressively-produced "jazz" records that I have ever heard. Live drum tracks are layered with sequenced loops, the musicians use an extensive array of signal processing effects, and liberal dollops of extreme compression and filtration are added courtesy of the control room. Certainly no effort has been spared to compensate for the dearth of musicality.

And, as one may have expected, the combination of bad writing and soloing is once again lethal. Scofield himself put it best at his March 2 performance at the Recher Theatre in Towson: "When I wrote [Idiofunk], I thought, 'This sounded like an idiot wrote it.'" It's track number two on the new album and - no surprises here - sounds an awful lot like the other cuts.

Even with all of this sonic evidence against him, I still refused to believe that the great Scofield has descended to such a nadir. So I went to his March 2 show at the Recher. Maybe, unencumbered by the confines and stresses of the recording studio, he and his band would relax and make some good music.

If you have never been to the Recher before, it is essentially a bar with enough space left over for a bandstand. The audience ranges from high school kids to 30- and 40-somethings, and isn't so hip that I feel too out of place in my collared shirt and slacks. But I am most definitely the only person in the room with a subscription to the Economist. And I've got two big X's on my hands to keep me objective.

As much as I wasn't really looking forward to the main act, the opening act only added to the ordeal. The opening act was the six-member unit Topaz from (allegedly) New York. Simply put, they were awful. They were guilty of all of the jam band sins. But at least they didn't attempt to call themselves jazz musicians. At least, that is, until their saxophonist announced that their sixth tune was "for Joe Henderson." Then I got a little hot under the collar.

The late Joe Henderson was one of the best saxophonists ever to play the instrument and an excellent jazz composer and arranger. This guy on stage was none of these things. In fact, he didn't play anything that suggested he had ever listened to Joe Henderson. He didn't have the tone, the dexterity or the harmonic creativity. And he was surrounded by five other musicians who similarly lacked the talent necessary to identify themselves with any musicians of Henderson's caliber. Nevertheless, the mostly young, mostly white audience seemed to enjoy it. One student in front of me did pass out. I felt oddly jealous.

So by the time the John Scofield Band took the stage, I was not just disappointed; I was angry. It took just three songs - "Acidhead" and "Snap Crackle Pop" from ?berjam and "Boozer" from A Go Go - for me to totally lose my patience. Far from redeeming himself, Mr. Scofield and Co. had only reinforced all of my reservations about his new work. The only difference in live performance was that the subpar soloing lasted longer.

Says Scofield about his new sound and image: "We've had a great time playing for a broader and often younger audience with this material. They really know about music, they really listen and their enjoyment is infectious. I get a real kick watching my audience dance while knowing that this holds up as jazz - it's not just dance music."

As one member of that younger audience, Mr. Scofield, I say: bullshit.