By Paul Robicheau

The jam-rock vibes and gnarly blues licks that Scofield showcased in many of his projects over the years weren’t evident in Saturday’s laid-back final set of his trio’s two-night stand.

John Scofield with Bill Stewart at Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

John Scofield has sealed his status as a guitar icon for over four decades, from his initial jazz-funk fusion with Miles Davis and as a solo artist in the 1980s through more recent jam-band dalliances with collaborators such as John Medeski, Warren Haynes, and the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. Scofield’s latest band album from 2023, featuring his current jazz trio of bassist Vincente Archer and longtime drummer Bill Stewart, even took its title from a closing cover of the Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.”

But the jam-rock vibes and gnarly blues licks that Scofield showcased in many of his projects over the years weren’t evident in Saturday’s laid-back final set of his trio’s two-night stand at the Regattabar — a nice warm-up for his primetime theater slot at the adventurous Big Ears Festival later this week in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Scofield, 74, began with a rubbery touch to his melodic flurries over Stewart’s light momentum on snare and ride cymbal in the standard “Blue Monk” and dipped into some blues with brisk phrases, sliding chords and laugh-imitating string bends in his own “Mo Green.” Yet when the guitarist’s shoutout to Boston/Cambridge drew a less-than-enthusiastic response, he introduced the Rodgers and Hart ballad “It’s Easy to Remember (and So Hard to Forget)” with the jab “This will wake you up.”

In a sense though, the move did play into the show’s mood – and its strong suit. Scofield softly thumbed that standard’s melody with a brittle sweetness, closing the tune by picking it out entirely on his upper frets before hitting wide-spaced chords into the low register. He didn’t need effect pedals or loops to spin sparse magic with skills and finesse.

That gently fluid chestnut certainly set the tone for the rest of the set, which eschewed rock-era nuggets (save for a hint of the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” in “Mo Green”). The guitarist just masterfully painted inside and outside the lines of each tune, weaving polychordal patterns and conversational clusters where songs’ melodic frameworks were lost within his frisky improv, purposely iced by a few skewed tonalities or harmonic spreads.

John Scofield Trio at Regattabar. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Archer lent thick ballast on acoustic bass, his dark, woody tone supporting the lean strokes served by Scofield and Stewart, though the oft-boomy bass could have used cleaner articulation in the mix. Archer nonetheless contributed a beautiful, lyrical solo to a set-peaking version of Carla Bley’s “Lawns,” which included mid-tune tradeoffs between a seated Scofield and Stewart, whose rhythms throughout the set often circled around a repeated pulse against one of his cymbals or drums. Scofield also notably bookended “Lawns” with graceful soliloquies, sketching the melody with rubbed notes before detuning a peg on the head of his guitar for the final punctuation.

It was an awkward letdown when the trio returned after a standing ovation for an anticipated encore only for Scofield to announce they’d played their contracted 75 minutes and would see fans “the next time,” seemingly to the surprise of Stewart, who was already sitting back at his kit. But the guitarist had made the most of the minimum in his trio’s last of four pricey but sold-out shows in the intimate room, with upcoming stands by his fellow Berklee-bred contemporaries and modern jazz guitar heroes Mike Stern and Bill Frisell slated for later this spring on the Regattabar’s bustling schedule.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.