Memories of Home

John Scofield and Dave Holland

2025 ECM Records

Engineer Mixing Producer Jazz

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Jazz — at its most essential — is conversation. It’s not just notes on a page, but the dialogue between human voices through instruments. In their 2025 release Memories of Home, guitarist John Scofield and bassist Dave Holland take that idea to its most beautiful and distilled form: a duo album that feels like two longtime friends sitting in your living room, speaking through sound.

Critical Acclaim

Press & Reviews

The Arts Fuse

ECM's usual impeccable attention to detail in the recording, and in this case that care has done a service for the ages. Holland is one of the world's masters of the bass, with a matchless ear for pitch and timbre, and his sound has rarely been captured so beautifully, even on his own records for ECM.

The Jazz Word

ECM's famously intimate sonic space... The transparency makes the duo's nuances audible, and that becomes an essential part of the album's charm.

Recorded in August 2024 at NRS Studios in Catskill, New York, Memories of Home marks the first strictly duo recording by these two giants — and it’s a testament to what decades of musical respect can create. Scofield’s warm, expressive guitar lines and Holland’s earth-toned double bass weave in and out of each other with an ease born of shared history. From their earliest collaborations with the likes of Herbie Hancock to fiery quartet work in ScoLoHoFo, these players have built a vocabulary together that feels both intuitive and endlessly rich.

What makes the album compelling is its range within enormous simplicity. There are moments of bluesy swing, like Holland’s tribute “Mr. B (Dedicated to Ray Brown),” and tender lyricism, like Scofield’s “Easy for You.” Yet the heart of the record feels rooted in space and reaction — every note responds to the one before it, every phrase is a question and an answer.

Critics have praised the album’s depth, noting that it rewards close listening — not as background music, but as a living, breathing exchange between two artists at the peak of their powers.

For fans of jazz in its purest form — where harmony and rhythm are created from touch, empathy, and imagination — Memories of Home stands as a modern classic of the duo format.

Track Listing

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