John Scofield first emerged in the mid-1970s playing with trumpeter Chet Baker and drummer Billy Cobham, whose own careers are covered in full in Chet Baker's JazzProfiles.com profile, before launching his solo career. He came to wider mainstream attention as a member of Miles Davis's band, touring the world and recording with Davis between 1982 and 1985 and contributing his guitar playing and some of his own compositions to three of Davis's albums: Star People, Decoy, and You're Under Arrest.

His jazz-rock fusion style blends fusion, bebop, and the direct influence of Miles Davis, and he has recorded nearly 50 albums as a leader, working alongside major players including Charlie Haden, Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jack DeJohnette, Joe Lovano, Brad Mehldau, and Eddie Harris; Haden's, Metheny's, and Shorter's own careers are covered in full elsewhere on this project. Across a 54-year career, Scofield has occasionally detoured from straight-ahead jazz tradition into a blend of funk and jazz, work that produced some of his most popular projects. He is a three-time Grammy Award winner, including for 2015's Past Present and 2016's Country for Old Men.

Scofield's distinctive, slightly distorted guitar tone and genre-crossing instinct, moving fluidly between post-bop, fusion, funk, blues, and soul-jazz, place him alongside Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell as one of the defining jazz guitarists to emerge from the late 20th century.