John Scofield

John Scofield :


Guitarist-composer, former Miles Davis sideman and a bandleader for the past 20 years.

When I first started to play guitar—this was before Hendrix—there was a chord known as the “Hold It” chord, an E sharp 9. It was based on a break tune that came from an older generation, a Bill Doggett song from the ’50s. And then Hendrix started to play this chord and it became known as the Jimi Hendrix Chord. You can hear it on “Purple Haze.” So the “Hold It” chord became the Jimi Hendrix Chord in 1968. Now, that’s a big influence right there.

I remember first hearing Hendrix’s music on the radio. It was on Murray the K’s show in New York. It was the tune “Fire.” I didn’t know anything about him. The first album had just come out and I heard this on the radio and was instantly knocked out. It was coming out of a little transistor radio but it completely blew me away, so I went out and bought Are You Experienced? the next day. I wasn’t a jazz guy yet; I was into Clapton and Jeff Beck. But Hendrix seemed to be on another level. I never heard anything that strong and I was just fascinated by it—the guitar playing and the beat and the whole thing. It seemed to me to be an extension of soul music and psychedelia combined with great blues guitar playing that related to B.B. and Albert King. I became a devotee and bought the next two albums—Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland—and I remember listening to those first three records all the time, trying to learn the licks and being totally into it.

And then I went to see Hendrix with the Experience at Hunter College in early ’69. I took the train in from Connecticut and it was a really, really incredible show. The way he played was so phenomenal and so loose and so soulful that I actually gave up rock ’n’ roll guitar and decided to become a jazz musician because of him. I remember thinking, “I can’t do that. I’m just a little white boy from the suburbs. Forget it. It’s all over. This guy is so outgoing and incredible that I might as well give up on trying to be like that because my personality’s not that way. But maybe these jazz guys like Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery—if I practice hard enough, maybe I can get there.” Later on I was able to absorb some of that Hendrix influence and let it come through in my own playing but at the time I was far too intimidated to do that.

I never thought of Hendrix as a jazz guitarist but I did think of him as an incredible blues player and an improviser in that tradition as well as someone who was improvising on a sonic level, experimenting with feedback and coming up with some incredible new sounds on his instrument. I didn’t see him as a guy playing rhythm changes, I saw him as a new branch of rhythm ’n’ blues—R&B and psychedelia combined. It was this magical trip that he was going on with letting the music expand. And we all followed, to some degree.

Source : http://jazztimes.com/articles/20150-jimi-hendrix-modern-jazz-axis