The Birdland

Wgg: How does it feel to be playing in the "Birdland" - a club that is owned by Joe Zawinul with whom you had played together for quite some time?

Scott: I've played here with Joe actually just a little while back. So I've been here before and it's a nice club. It's a little bit dry for us because you don't really get a ...

It's a dry stage. We are used to have a little bit more reaction roomwise. It makes us more of a rock band. It makes it sound pretty small but yet if you go out in the house it sounds really good. It sounds big like it's supposed to, but the stage is really dry.

It fools you and you think you sound really small because all the music disappears. There's no ambience whatsoever. But that's just this room and I imagine after a couple of nights we'll get used to it.

Last night we were playing and it sounded really small and dry. I was adding reverb to my sound and stuff, but you know I went out in the house to hear the drum solo and the bass solo and it sounded huge. It sounded really great like it's supposed to. It's just a weird stage. Every stage is different, it just takes some getting used to but by the weekend we'll be used to it.

Jazz vs. Blues

Wgg: Scott, you are famous for your world class fusion playing with Tribal Tech. There you have all those complex changes with intricate rhythms. Here you are on tour with your Blues band. Do you approach these 2 playing situations differently? 

Scott: Well, I don't really look at it any different from the playing standpoint. It's more different just from the compositional standpoint because there's music where you don't use certain parts of your vocabulary.

I don't really like to play Blues tunes and insert Jazz licks unless the changes require that.

From a playing standpoint you don't really  change your attitude when you play. You just play from a different vocabulary but the intent and phrasing and all that stuff, the tone... thinking about tone, it's exactly the same. You just play within the composition. That's it. That's really it.

Playing Blues is just a different form of expression. The way I look at it, it is actually way more difficult than Jazz.

Jazz kinda plays itself. In a way if you play 8th notes and play notes within the chord structure you are already doing it. You don't have to think about it.

I guess the timing thing and the phrasing thing isn't as important. It's easy to play 8th notes. Anybody can play 8th notes and as long as you have done your technical homework and you know which notes go over which chords you are already kind of there.

Of course, some Jazz players have way more vocabulary than others. I don't have nearly as much Jazz vocabulary as I'd like to have, but I have enough to get me through standards and whatever kind of changes or music I need to play.

The Blues thing is way, way more advanced. It's trying to capture the soul of great Blues players before us.

I'm nowhere near the Blues player than I am a Jazz player. Everytime I listen to Albert King I wonder why I even try to play the Blues, but I love Blues so much.

My Blues phrasing and my Blues playing is on a very immature level compared to the guys that I look up to. I'm always striving to get there and to improve my phrasing and stuff and because the phrasing floats it's a way more harder thing to capture than just playing in time - which in my mind if you have decent time anybody can do. That's not that hard. But when you float over the time that's where it sort of separates the men from the boys.

When I hear guys that can really play, float over the time and play amazing shit, that's the players I look up to the most. And there are those Jazz players that do that really well like Wayne Shorter. That's why he is one of my favorite saxophone players, because he is not just a line player that just plays lines of 16th and 8th notes all the time but he is able to float over the time and play from more of a Blues man's approach yet with all that Jazz vocabulary.

Zawinul is another guy who is amazing in the way that he phrases. He's not like an 8th note "doodeler" which is what he calls it - and not that I have anything against 8th notes because I play 8th notes myself when I play Jazz. But there is a certain way to float over the time that is really to me a more otherworldly type of playing. And the masters that can do that have always caught my ear way more than guys that just play 8th notes and 16th notes lines.

To me the whole thing is about phrasing and to play better phrases. Phrasing and tone - those are the 2 most important things to me. That's what I listen to when I listen to music and that's what I try to play when I play music and the optimum word there is "try" - that's my intent, anyway.