StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Spotlight on the John Scofield Joe Lovano Quartet

Today, StLJN's video spotlight shines on the John Scofield Joe Lovano Quartet, who will be in St. Louis to perform starting next Wednesday, April 25 through Saturday, April 28 at Jazz at the Bistro.

In terms of both popularity and musical accomplishments, both Scofield and Lovano rank in the upper echelon of current jazz players on their respective instruments, and their musical relationship dates back to the early 1990s, when they put together the first version of the quartet.

However, since both are involved in multiple musical projects, their gigs together in recent years have been comparatively rare, with their most recent quartet tour coming back in 2015, and that's the time from which most of today's videos are drawn.

The best-produced documentation from that tour probably is the recording of Scofield, Lovano, bassist Ben Street and drummer Bill Stewart in November at the Leverkusener Jazztage festival in Germany, and you can see a version of Scofield's "Chariots" from that show in the first embedded video up above.

After the jump, there are three more performances from that same Leverkusener Jazztage show: "Slinky," "Hangover," and "Chap Dance."

The fifth clip is an audience-shot video that catches them a little earlier in the same tour, playing "Cymbolism" in late October at the Republic Theater in Salzburg, Germany.

Next, you can see a nearly hour-long interview with both men, recorded in October 2015 at the Blue Note in New York City for NYU's Steinhardt Interview Series.

Last but not least, there's a blast from the past that documents the long duration of the Lovano/Scofield partnership, in the form of a full set of the two of them with Stewart and the late bassist Dennis Irwin in 1993 at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...