Scofield says about überjam that it's got enough funk for the college crowd and enough jazz for his old core fans, and he's pretty well right. It's tough to make a mark in the already well-gouged furrow of jazz-meets-hip-hop, and Scofield's so far had mixed success, but in überjam, he's produced his most consistently satisfying effort in the style. He's joined by his core trio, Avi Bortnick (guitars and samples), Jesse Murphy (bass) and Adam Deitch (drums and rap), plus guests John Medeski (mellotron, organ and clavinet) and Karl Denson (flute and saxophone). The result is a stew of high-energy grooves, spacey, sampled noises and swampy vamps. Perhaps the most succinct evidence of Scofield's happy symbiosis of jazz and dance is in "I Brake 4 Monster Booty", where a brief packet of hard, compressed rap precedes a ferocious guitar solo that has the pace and attack of a man half of Scofield's 50 years. In some of his jazz-dance efforts he's seemed content with laconic blues licks, but here the gloves are off. There's more intensely chromatic jazz in the grinding "überjam", the mood lightened by an ironically contorted quotation of "Blue Moon". That event is something of an indicator for the whole record: Sco's having a good time and making sure we get earfuls of the righteous stuff too. --Mark Gilbert
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