Scott Fields was born in Chicago. As a teenager he played guitar, sang, and wrote songs for rock and blues bands. In his teens, however, he became interested in New Music and avant-garde jazz. The neighborhood in which he was born and raised—Hyde Park, on the city’s south side—was home to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. The AACM was the center of Chicago’s free jazz movement. It incorporated many musical genres, such as Asian classical music, African tribal music, and techniques that descended from European classical traditions.
The experience of hearing this music and meeting some of its artists led Fields down the path of the avant-garde. At the age of 17 Fields formed the trio “Life Rhythms,” for which he played guitar, tenor and soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet, and sundry percussion. Life Rhythms, the loudest avant-jazz group in Chicago, performed most often at rock venues and festivals.
At the age of 23 Fields stopped performing and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he studied classical guitar with George Lindquist and took classes in composition and music theory at the University of Wisconsin. Later he studied jazz guitar with Carl Michel and Roger Brotherhood and classical guitar with Javier Calderon and Wulfin Lieske. During this period Fields managed to earn a diploma as an electronics technician, undergraduate degrees in journalism and economics, and a graduate degree in mass communication research. (His thesis was an experiment that tested how reading music criticism affects the way people listen to music.)
In 1989 Fields returned to performance. As leader of his own groups and as a sideman, Fields has toured throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He has released more than 30 CDs as a leader or co-leader, has been a sideman on numerous other recordings and appears on several compilation CDs. In 2003 he resettled in Cologne, Germany.
On occasion Fields is commissioned to write for dance troupes, instrumentalists, and multi-media artists. Grants include awards from the Wisconsin Arts Board (research fellowship), the Dane County Cultural Commission, Madison CitiArts, and Arts Midwest. Fellowships have included the Omi Arts in New York State and the NAIRS Arts Residency in the Swiss Alps. He has been commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik, The Bonn Beethoven Festival, the Milwaukee Improvisers Orchestra, Kanopy Dance, Li Chiao-Ping Dance, the Wisconsin Alliance for Composers, Douglas Rosenburg, Arno Oehri, the Köln Musiktriennale, and the Brühl Haydn Festival.