S.The smell of sulfur often got into the nose of the listeners at his concerts. As with Niccolò Paganini, if Heinrich Heine is to be believed. John McLaughlin is the one who has traveled the fastest, highest, furthest with his guitar. Loudest and most demonic too. That means something with all the pyrotechnicians on the six strings, especially in rock music circles who, when they no longer gave any musical enhancements, dismantled their e-instruments with brute force on the stage into all their individual parts, trampled them on and set them on fire; from Pete Townshend to Ritchie Blackmore – notoriously rabid punk rockers ignored.
After all, McLaughlin has to be credited with trying to musically exceed the expressive limits of his instrument – even with the eighteen-string electric double-necked guitar. His virtuosity and his complex playing remained uncanny. Especially when the man from tranquil Yorkshire called himself Mahavishnu in the seventies and, with his Indian-oriented orchestra and the Shakti group, displayed such rapid phrasing, at the same time downright eerie precision in melodic unison with culturally socialized musicians. That could not be done with the right things. When he heard the precision in McLaughlin’s high-energy runs, Frank Zappa said he played the guitar like a machine gun.
A short hop to Miles Davis
McLaughlin, who from a middle-class musical background was surrounded by piano and violin sounds at an early age, began as a member of the blues and rhythm & blues circle in England, whose effect on the musical scene can hardly be overestimated. With Alexis Korner, Georgie Fame, Graham Bond he created a tonal language that went far beyond traditional twelve-bar schemes or bebop accents and brought together all sorts of jazz and rock elements. At the end of the 1960s, he was one of the continent’s most interesting fusion musicians, who also caught the attention of the American scene, especially drummer Tony Williams, who brought McLaughlin into his band Lifetime, from which it was only a stone’s throw to Miles Davis.
It is no exaggeration to say that all of Miles’s outstanding productions since “In a Silent Way” – with the epochal album “Bitches Brew”, with “Jack Johnson”, “Live Evil”, “Big Fun” or “On the Corner “- have been largely shaped by John McLaughlin’s progressive guitar sound and his overwhelming sense of rhythm. Miles Davis’ verdict that he was “hellishly good” was the “summa cum laude” issued by the best jazz university of the time. After that, all doors were open to John McLaughlin, whatever the musical label between jazz, fusion, Latin music and rock was. But he wasn’t just the “first call” guitarist who was called first when something spectacular was imminent or when a new superband had to be cast. He has led the most successful bands of the seventies, of which the Mahavishnu Orchestra was also the first commercially.
With small ensembles, the trio with Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucía, the jazz fusion quartet The 4th Dimension or the Trio of Doom with Tony Williams and Jaco Pastorius, he has achieved the greatest attention in Europe and America. How versatile McLaughlin is as an interpreter and composer, he has shown in crossover projects with classical ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the duos with the pianist Katia Labèque or the ballet “Thieves and Poets”. Perhaps the only guitarist to be in the studio with both Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, he has influenced everyone who has played guitar since the 1960s, from Jeff Beck to Pat Metheny. Today he is celebrating his eightieth birthday.
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