Scofield, Hudson touch on jazz majesty at Playboy fest

The supergroup Hudson, with guitarist John Scofield, offered tantalizing glimpses Saturday of transcendent jazz – that combination of mastery, interaction and inspiration that marks the music’s milestones and provides a measure of its ongoing vitality.

The late afternoon segment of the 39th Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl included plenty of fun, skillful performers spanning a range of the jazz spectrum and beyond. Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, headliner Marcus Miller, vibraphonist Stefan Harris, the infectious California Honeydrops and others turned in solid performances with moments of soaring artistry.

But those acts create and perform within well-defined musical boundaries. The forms, styles and interplay are predictable.

Scofield and the rest of the quartet calling itself Hudson – the four veterans all live in the Hudson River Valley – are a different kettle of fish.

Drummer Jack DeJohnette and keyboardist John Medeski have careers threaded with wide-open musical strategies in which structure ranges from malleable to spontaneously evolving.

Over the past decade, Scofield has demonstrated his comfort and rousing facility in such uncharted waters – particularly in collaboration with Medeski’s best-known project, Medeski Martin & Wood. Upright bassist Larry Grenadier, a first-call bassist and longtime member of Brad Mehldau’s trio, also has a history of fly-by-the-seat fluency.

The result is art taking shape before your eyes and ears. When the chemistry and camaraderie and stars align, it’s like seeing time-lapse photography of the life of a flowering plant for the first time.

Take the opening tune, a take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Wait Until Tomorrow” that was both immediately identifiable and a natural, distinctive vehicle for the group.

After stating the theme with a funky, in-the-pocket groove and several outré asides, Scofield launched into a pungent, strutting improvisation that offered little trace of musical influences. Working without his usual arsenal of pedals, he displayed his ability to coax a vast arrangement of sounds from his black Ibanez six string.

Medeski, on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, offered now-pushing, now-pulling accompaniment over the slightly off-kilter bass-and-drums backing before launching into his own flight. It was a spiky, interstellar journey that began with obvious nods to Chick Corea’s playing with Miles Davis before subsuming that history into his predictably unpredictable musical voice.

The 45-minute set continued with a mix of originals and circa-1970 rock covers, including a moving and gentle – and nonetheless adventurous – take on Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.”  Despite the stylistic range of material – including a couple of vocals by DeJohnette – the personalities of the individuals and of the unit overall brought a cohesiveness to the outing.

But the peak moments came and went, often within a phrase or two, a bit of an unsettled confab that felt short-circuited at times. They would hit a moment of lift-off and then it would flare out.

Of course, that’s a hazard of the no-safety-net approach. The question is whether the gig was a victim of the relatively short set and tight scheduling, or perhaps the relatively new association of the four together in one group.

A similarly promising collaboration a few years ago among DeJohnette, Scofield and organist Larry Goldings – dubbed Trio Beyond – never lived up to its potential. On the other hand, the Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood congregation has repeatedly displayed an incredible level of spontaneous artistry in its periodic efforts over the past 25 years.

Here’s hoping the latter is the case with Hudson.

39th Playboy Jazz Festival

Where: Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

When: June 10