JAZZ REVIEW : Scofield Quartet Blisters the Walls at Catalina Bar and Grill

If the heart of jazz is steaming improvisation, then the John Scofield quartet is a jazz band with a capital “B.”

This group scorches. Even in the group’s first set at Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood Tuesday, when the leader and his men were still getting used to new surroundings--they had just arrived in town after a tour of Japan--the band blew out the walls.

Three E’s--enthusiasm, energy and electricity--were at the core of the Scofield performance. Typically, the New York-based band played a tune’s melody line, then turned up the gas.

Scofield and tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, the featured soloists, were provided with a current of pulsing rhythm by acoustic bassist Anthony Cox and drummer John Riley that would have made a dervish dancer out of Lazarus.

Songs like “Wabash III,” “So Sue Me” and “Let’s Say We Did,” all taken from the leader’s new “Time on My Hands” (Blue Note) album, made up the bulk of the performance. These were not be-bop numbers, where a hand-in-glove interweaving of melody and harmony takes prominence, but contemporary pieces, where free-wheeling, though not free-form, improvisations were delivered in an edgy, charged rhythmic and harmonic atmosphere. And the fellows knew their stuff: segues within pieces were clean and tight and endings were right on the dot.

The group had a push-pull effect: It was warm one moment, distant the next, the music went from dark and dense to open and lilting, the musicians’ sounds were alternately voice-like and demonic. Not everything was loud--lyricism and dynamics were said hello to now and again--but most of it was intense.

Scofield got a myriad of sounds out of his hollow-body instrument, from tones thin and high as a gleaming tightrope to thick, gritty, electronically-enhanced utterances that bordered on white noise. He played rocketing lines and chords that buzzed and snarled like a live wire loose on the ground, with Riley right there with him, kicking, pushing prodding.

Lovano employed a big, fat tone and worked mostly with an extremely fluent Coltrane-influenced approach of which he’s a master. His efforts ran from whispered, pencil-thin high tones to guttural bursts that smeared a gaggle of notes into a multihewed blur. The tenorist and Scofield often stood face to face and blew speedy, agile phrases at each other as fast as they could think.

Cox and Riley were a major reason why the band swung, in its most modern way, as hard as it did. They were a consistent, insistent force.

In this quartet, Scofield, a presence on the contemporary jazz scene for 15 years who plays at Catalina through Saturday, has a group that reveals glimpses of the past and vistas of the future. It’s a jazz band for the 21st Century, and a very musical one at that.