Sitting at the heart of tonight’s world premiere are two figures of huge importance to Mark-Anthony Turnage. The first, Sir Simon Rattle, for whose 70th birthday Sco was commissioned, is one of the composer’s longest-standing champions. The second is tonight’s soloist, the man who gives Sco its name, John Scofield. The US guitarist was one of the four jazz soloists to develop and premiere Turnage’s seminal work Blood on the Floor alongside Ensemble Modern in mid 1990s. ‘I saw something in his music that had an affinity with what I was doing,’ Turnage said of the experience. ‘There was a lyricism, but it was slightly angular – something was slightly off – which I loved.’ Two years later, Turnage wrote Silent Cities, based on Scofield’s song ‘The Nag’, and four years after that, he created a suite of re-invented Scofield tunes called Scorched (a portmanteau of ‘Scofield orchestrated’).
Forged around this singular artistic voice (‘You can tell within one bar that it’s him playing’), Sco is steeped in personal touches. The outer movements are dedicated to Schofield himself, ‘Sco Train’ chugging steady atop a percussion, harp and pizzicato-string bedrock, ‘Sco Funk’ a rowdy, swirling mass of articulation. The second and third movements take inspiration from places: ‘Katonah Chorale’ is a soft hymn to the rural New York town where Scofield lives with his wife Susan, while the quirky little ‘Brooklyn Blues’ is dedicated to their daughter Jean and her family. The fourth-movement ‘Aria’, with its swelling, legato statements and introspective mood, is dedicated to Scofield’s late son, Evan, and his partner Ursula. (Turnage’s 2014–15 orchestral work Remembering was also written in memory of Evan.)
The score is a monument to the remarkable artistic trust that Turnage and Scofield have in one another. Great swathes of the solo part are simply marked ‘Solo’, with just a scale on which to improvise. Sometimes Scofield is given a melody or rhythmic figure to embellish, but rarely are whole passages fully notated. In this way, Sco is not so much a traditional concerto but a series of themed canvases – invitations for Scofield to make play. Turnage has not always given his musicians such freedom, but his experience with Blood on the Floor was formative: ‘My work now is less fussily notated and gives more space for the performers to express themselves. The more space I give, the more effective it sounds, and the more comfortable they are playing it.’