WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sometimes you just feel like dancing, getting loose, snapping your fingers, blaring the music in your car. You're thinking James Brown, the breakdown of the beat.

You don't want techno drum machines. It leaves you cold. You want funk.

Start spinning "A Go Go," the latest CD by John Scofield on Verve Records. He brings his guitar to the organ, bass, and drums trio of jazz-funk band Medeski, Martin & Wood.

It almost sounds like a garage jam session, not a lot of fancy stuff. Very open and still smart. It's music that can mine a rhythm, even a simple one, and get deeper and deeper as it goes along.

"I don't even want to say I wanted to make a fun record, because there's nothing worse than happy jazz," says Scofield, who has played with just about everyone in the jazz world and is always a favorite in the jazz guitar polls.

But this CD isn't happy, or vapid. It's hip.

"I wanted to get down, as they say, and make you want to move, even if you don't move, even if moving consists of tapping one toe. I consider that dancing," he says.

In retrospect, it seems natural that the veteran jazzman turned to John Medeski, Billy Martin and Chris Wood for the project. The three youngsters have been making waves around the alternative rock scene for a few years, playing extended jazz improvisations in small rock venues, fronting for larger rock acts, and finding a new jazz audience.

Scofield had heard their latest record, "Shack-man," and asked his producer if he had their phone number.

"The only number he had was their fan line -- which is the number where fans are supposed to call if they want to leave a message for Billy or whatever -- so I called it and left a message, and it took them a couple of weeks to get back.

"John Medeski called back and talked to my wife, Susan, and said, 'Is this really John Scofield?' They thought it was their friends from music school goofing on them."

From there, they had a few informal jam sessions in New York, for which Scofield wrote a number of tunes -- real simple heads, or themes, off of which they could improvise.

"After we played the first time, I said, 'This really works for me,' and it did, from the first note was right," Scofield says.

Scofield has a role model in this kind of groove sound. He played with Miles Davis in the '80s, when Miles liked to toy with simple melodies such as Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." Scofield also relies on the guitar-organ combo, at the heart of a lot of soul jazz, and he revels in group play.

He talks about vamps -- the repetitive rhythmic figures that musicians solo over -- as the key to the exercise. Alone, they can be mundane, but in the right band, they can be much deeper.

"There's something that can happen in vamp music that doesn't happen anywhere else in jazz, a certain kind of intensity, a kind of trance and groove that can happen, and I can do better than anything else in a way," he said.

"I've also matured and learned how to do it because a vamp can be nothing -- by itself it can be boring as hell. But when the players are hooked up and it's going to a certain place, and the audience feels it and you can feel it from them, it can be this other thing that is really special," Scofield said.

"Chank," the second cut on the record, provides a good example of what's at work -- a short opening theme, moving into a simple rhythmic structure over which Scofield solos. But with the awareness and alacrity of Martin's drums and in the comping from organist Medeski, it gets deeper.

There's also an intensity on this record that comes more from holding back than from burning.

You won't hear histrionics on the organ, which some keyboard players find hard to avoid in this setting. There isn't much busy guitar work. And while Martin, the drummer, gets a deep backbeat going, he's always sparse.

So the music burns slow and kind of hits the listener deep down, rather than up front. It's a sound that, well, makes you want to move.

(Sam Fromartz, a Washington-based journalist, enjoys listening to and writing about jazz. Any opinions expressed here are his own.)

Reuters/Variety