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John McLaughlin.
 

His Goals Beyond

John McLaughlin's fearless acoustic explorations

By Bill Milkowski

A guitar hero in the truest sense of the word, John McLaughlin played a key role in igniting the volatile jazz-rock fusion movement at the outset of the '70s with his blistering electric guitar work for Tony Williams Lifetime, Miles Davis, and his own groundbreaking Mahavishnu Orchestra. In the service of those seminal fusion bands, the British guitarist combined raw, over-the-top abandon with a focused intensity and searching quality that suggested a link between the tumultuous jams of Jimi Hendrix and the spiritually heightened flights of latter-day John Coltrane. For a generation of aspiring guitar players, John McLaughlin was the bridge between those two camps.

After hearing McLaughlin play, hordes of guitarists around the world (including future stars Steve Morse and Kevin Eubanks) began digging in a little deeper and emulating McLaughlin's furious fretboard feats. His visceral aesthetic was propelled forward by such kindred spirits as Larry Coryell with the Eleventh House, Al Di Meola with Return to Forever, and Allan Holdsworth with both Bruford and Jean-Luc Ponty.

By the mid-'70s, the momentum of the original jazz-rock fusion movement had fizzled out. Even McLaughlin bailed, disbanding the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1975 to focus on the purity of acoustic guitar with Shakti, his pioneering band of East meets West, which predated the popular world music trend by at least a decade.

But McLaughlin had been down the acoustic path before. Acoustic guitar was indeed his first instrument, which he picked up at the age of 11 when he began playing along with records by American bluesmen like Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. He has had an ongoing love affair with the instrument ever since.

"I love the sound of acoustic guitar," said McLaughlin the day after an exhilarating performance at Symphony Space in New York by Remember Shakti, a reunited version of the seminal band, sans two charter members. "It's something I can't be without for too long. I don't know what it is, it's just so . . . evocative. It's an antique sound. And it makes some very different resonances inside of you . . . your heart or your soul, your subconscious or whatever you want to call it. But it touches another part of you. And it has this kind of pathos built into it that electric guitar doesn't have. It's got its own thing."

UNPLUGGED, 1970

McLaughlin's first major statement on the acoustic guitar came in 1970 with My Goals Beyond, a timeless classic that was a personal favorite of acoustic guitar virtuosos like Pierre Bensusan and the late Michael Hedges. Recorded for the Douglas label (and since reissued by Knitting Factory), the album features McLaughlin in a reflective solo acoustic setting on side one of the album (remember vinyl?), performing such evocative pieces as Miles Davis' "Blue in Green" and McLaughlin's own signature piece "Follow Your Heart." Side two consists of two open-ended, Indian-flavored jams titled "Peace One" and "Peace Two" featuring saxophonist Dave Liebman, bassist Charlie Haden, percussionist Airto, Indian tabla master Badal Roy, drummer Billy Cobham, and violinist Jerry Goodman. One of the highlights of this stunning early entry in McLaughlin's extensive discography is his beautiful solo rendition of the melancholy Charles Mingus ballad "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." As Bensusan recently expressed it, "That is one of the most amazing solo guitar pieces ever made."

Nearly 30 years later, McLaughlin confesses that he hasn't actually listened to his own acoustic masterpiece in a long time, though he says he can still hear the melodies in his head. During our interview, he closed his eyes at one point and began humming the beautiful ballad "Hearts and Flowers."

"What My Goals Beyond represented for me at the time was just my love of the acoustic guitar," says the 57-year-old guitar legend. "I wanted people to hear the acoustic guitar in a different setting. The only acoustic guitar we heard until then was from Django Reinhardt or from classical players. Even the great country players like Chet Atkins and Merle Travis were always playing electric. But I just wanted to share my affection for the acoustic guitar by doing a completely acoustic album."

Always the pioneer, McLaughlin recorded the ethereally acoustic My Goals Beyond two decades before MTV's Unplugged phenomenon. "It's funny to see all these years later this whole unplugged movement," he says, laughing. "Eric Clapton did it, Paul McCartney did it. I actually saw they had Kiss on the Unplugged show. I thought that was humorous. It became very à la mode, didn't it?"

BETWEEN EXTREMES

From the time of his debut recording in England, 1969's Extrapolation, to the present, John McLaughlin has balanced his love of the acoustic guitar with his passion for the electric. "I go from one to the other," he acknowledges. "It's hard to let either one go."

Even in the midst of his most tumultuous electric periods with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the acoustic guitar was still there, sandwiched between raw decibels like the eye of a hurricane. Amidst the seething energy of the Inner Mounting Flame there was "A Lotus on Irish Streams," a gentle trio offering with McLaughlin on acoustic, Jan Hammer on grand piano, and Jerry Goodman on violin. On Mahavishnu's equally visceral follow-up, 1972's Birds of Fire, there was another delicate trio ballad in "Thousand Island Park." Even on 1978's Electric Dreams and 1979's Electric Guitarist, two virtual manifestos for power chords and distortion licks, there were brief interludes of acoustic purity.

But there have also been extended periods in McLaughlin's career where he has totally immersed himself in the acoustic guitar, and the results have often been breathtaking. From 1975 to 1978 there was Shakti, the astonishing acoustic quartet whose name translates to creative intelligence, beauty, and power. Spurred on by virtuoso violinist L. Shankar, percussionist T.H. "Vikku" Vinayakram, and tabla master Zakir Hussain, McLaughlin reached some inspired heights in this rarefied setting. By fusing north and south Indian classical music and Western improvisation (i.e., jazz), the band was, in essence, finding common ground between the lengthy ragas of Ravi Shankar and the extended modal improvisations of John Coltrane.

In 1978, after three albums and various triumphant international tours with Shakti, McLaughlin put his acoustic guitar on the shelf, proclaiming to the press, "I felt my electric roots bubbling up again." He formed the One Truth Band and recorded the aptly titled Electric Dreams playing a customized Gibson ES-345 guitar with a scalloped fretboard. He followed that up in 1979 with the searing Johnny McLaughlin: Electric Guitarist, an all-star project that featured saxophonists Michael Brecker and David Sanborn, pianists Cecil Taylor and Chick Corea, bassists Stanley Clarke and Jack Bruce, and fellow electric guitar hero Carlos Santana along with former Mahavishnu bandmates Billy Cobham and Jerry Goodman.

THE TRIO

Switching modes once again, McLaughlin dipped back into a purely acoustic mode in 1980 with a nylon-string guitar in the Trio, a supergroup featuring Spain's flamenco master Paco de Lucía and the daring young American chopsmeister Al Di Meola. Their enormously successful summit meeting, Friday Night in San Francisco (Columbia), recorded on December 5, 1980, at the Warfield Theatre, was hailed as "a victory for the acoustic guitar" by Guitar Player magazine and helped draw enthusiastic crowds to concert halls around the world.

The very notion was audacious for its time—three acoustic guitars on stage, no rhythm section, no accompanying percussion instruments of any kind, no amplifiers in sight. And yet, in spite of the purely acoustic nature of the gig, these three guitar masters generated the kind of visceral response from the Warfield audience generally reserved for bands wailing through stacks of Marshall amps with their settings on stun. Hoots and hollers accompanied every flamenco flourish on pieces like Di Meola's "Mediterranean Sundance," Chick Corea's "Short Tales of the Black Forest," Egberto Gismonti's "Frevo Rasgado," and McLaughlin's "Guardian Angel." Every lightning run up and down the neck, every crisply executed unison line, every impossible speed lick was met with screams of delirium from the crowd of guitar fanatics.

"On stage we had a wonderful time, and the audiences seemed to be thrilled with the whole idea of three acoustic guitars playing together," McLaughlin recalls. "This kind of intimacy was probably refreshing to them. It certainly was to us."

In 1983, McLaughlin, de Lucía, and Di Meola followed up their stunning debut with the superb studio effort Passion, Grace, and Fire (Columbia), an apt description of the Trio's musical sensibility. They would reunite 13 years later for a triumphant tour and studio recording, 1996's Paco de Lucía/John McLaughlin/Al Di Meola (Verve). Chalk it up to a natural process of maturing and mellowing on the part of all involved, but this most recent outing by the Trio does not have the same kind of thrilling, edge-of-your-seat bravado that marked their first encounter back in 1980. As Di Meola said of Friday Night in San Francisco, "It was a night of pure balls to the wall, but highly creative balls to the wall. It was an unbelievable climax to our first two-month tour."

The music of the Trio some 16 years later is marked by more harmonic sophistication, more thoughtful structure, and more engaging melodic content, while the playing is imbued with more lyricism and tenderness. There's a genuine feeling of the three guitarists being more at ease this time around, in a soulful, all-knowing way.

NEW HORIZONS

Through the early '80s, when he wasn't touring and recording with the Trio, McLaughlin continued to embrace the acoustic guitar as his main voice on two excellent Warner Brothers releases—Belo Horizonte, recorded in June of 1981 in Paris with a cast of French musicians including classical pianist Katia Labeque on synthesizers and American drummer Tommy Campbell, and Music Spoken Here, recorded in Paris the following summer. Placing the acoustic guitar in the midst of an electric band setting, particularly with a drummer as potent as Campbell, was a risky undertaking for McLaughlin and proved to be problematic in live situations. But the music was still quintessentially, brilliantly McLaughlin.

"I believe if you listen to Shakti or my Belo Horizonte album or the Trio albums or any of my others, it's just guitar," he told Down Beat's Howard Mandel. "I'm a guitar player. That's what I'll always be. I like to write music, but I want to be a better and better guitar player just as I want to be a better person. I want to be more articulate, able to utilize space better, to play silence more profoundly. There are many things left for me to do, much work to be done. And that can all be accomplished on acoustic guitar."

The mid-'80s saw a return to electric guitar (and Roland guitar synthesizer) with a vengeance. In 1984, McLaughlin assembled a third edition of the Mahavishnu Orchestra featuring saxophonist Bill Evans, keyboardist Mitchell Forman, electric bass phenom Jonas Hellborg, and charter Mahavishnu member Billy Cobham. They recorded the powerhouse Mahavishnu (Warner Brothers), which featured the lovely acoustic number "When Blue Turns Gold" with bansuri flute master Hariprasad Chaurasia (who would appear with McLaughlin 15 years later on the live Remember Shakti) and tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, a member of the original Shakti lineup. After extensive touring (with drummer Danny Gottlieb replacing Cobham), they followed that initial offering with 1986's blistering Adventures in Radioland (Relativity).

GUITAR AND ORCHESTRA

Another acoustic triumph came late in 1985 with the premiere of The Mediterranean, a concerto for guitar and orchestra. Commissioned by Ernest Fleishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the concerto was first performed in Los Angeles in November 1985 with McLaughlin as soloist. It received a standing ovation from the first-night audience and raves from the critics. Further performances took place all over the world, and the piece was subsequently recorded in 1988 with the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. It was released on CBS Masterworks (now Sony Classical), augmented by five duet pieces with McLaughlin and classical pianist Katia Labeque, including the very lyrical "Zakir," a piece first performed on Zakir Hussain's 1987 ECM album Making Music and reprised on 1999's Remember Shakti.

Compared to McLaughlin's first large-scale orchestral project—the Mahavishnu Orchestra's ambitious 1974 recording Apocalypse (Columbia), produced by George Martin of Beatles fame and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas—the orchestra is far more organically integrated into the mix on The Mediterranean. As McLaughlin explained in the liner notes, "This project, however adventurous it may have seemed, still allowed me to play in the familiar context of a group surrounded by a symphony orchestra. In sharp contrast to Apocalypse, The Mediterranean is for solo guitar and symphony orchestra." A second concerto for guitar and orchestra called Europa was commissioned by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and performed with that fine young 85-piece orchestra during a tour that traveled through all the capitals of Europe.

Parallel to his more classical-oriented activities, McLaughlin founded a new trio in 1988 that highlighted his interest in combining acoustic purity with digital technology. With electric bassist Kai Eckhardt-Karpeh and percussionist Trilok Gurtu, the John McLaughlin Trio toured all over the world for five successive years and received overwhelming raves from both critics and fans alike. Two albums were released—1990's Live at the Royal Festival Hall and 1992's Que Alegria, which saw bassist Dominique Di Piazza replacing Eckhardt-Karpeh. On both albums, McLaughlin employed his nylon-string guitar outfitted with a MIDI interface to create a wide palette of synthesized sounds.

CELEBRATING BILL EVANS

Following his groundbreaking work with the trio, McLaughlin released what he called a "life-long dream of recording" in 1993. Time Remembered (Verve) was a heartfelt homage to the great pianist, composer, and Miles Davis sideman Bill Evans, performed on five acoustic guitars by McLaughlin and the Aighetta Quartet, a European classical guitar ensemble. With McLaughlin improvising over strict arrangements for five guitars and acoustic bass, the group turned in stately renditions of such evocative and inherently lyrical Evans compositions as "Turn out the Stars" and "Waltz for Debby."

"It's a more classical, maybe more European view of Bill's music," McLaughlin told Down Beat writer John Diliberto. "Both Bill and Gil Evans brought this very strong color of the French impressionists—Ravel, Debussy, and Satie—into jazz music, especially Bill, who is essentially a romantic. And for me, the guitar is a romantic instrument. And I felt that if I transcribed [the piece] for a number of guitars, I could translate the essential character from the way he played it on piano."

Although McLaughlin hasn't pursued that project in recent years, he has plans to reunite the group at some point in the future. "I've already done three arrangements," he says, "and I wouldn't do that if I didn't have any intention of playing them sometime or recording them, because it's a lot of work. Do you know how much time it takes to do one arrangement for the Time Remembered group? One tune is about two weeks of work. There's a phenomenal amount of work involved because there's a part for everybody, but it also has to be a part that's interesting, that says something about the piece. But I did three already—'Stella by Starlight,' 'The Dolphin,' and 'My Foolish Heart.'"

FURTHER ADVENTURES

McLaughlin's 1995 album The Promise (Verve) included a special summit meeting with de Lucía and Di Meola on "El Ciego," a foreshadowing of their 1996 reunion project. The following year saw the formation of the Heart of Things, another powerful electric ensemble featuring drummer Dennis Chambers, keyboardist Jim Beard, electric bassist Matthew Garrison (son of longtime Coltrane bassist Jimmy Garrison), and tenor saxophonist Gary Thomas. On the group's 1997 self-titled debut, McLaughlin plays just a touch of acoustic guitar on the intro to "Seven Sisters" and a lovely duet performed on steel-string acoustic guitar with keyboardist Jim Beard on "When Love Is Far Away." For the rest of the recording, he opts for a mellow-toned Gibson Johnny Smith hollow-body electric as his main ax.

September 1997 saw a reunion of the remarkable Shakti band for a series of special concerts around the United Kingdom. With no plan in mind, McLaughlin and company ran tape on four performances and later sold the project to Verve, which subsequently released the two-CD set Remember Shakti in the summer of 1999. The performances with bamboo flute player Hariprasad Chaurasia were somewhat subdued, but the sparks really flew when the group was joined by electric mandolin phenom U. Srinivas. The 30-year-old Srinivas, who debuted in Carnegie Hall at the ripe old age of nine, challenged McLaughlin on a nightly basis with his uncanny flourishes. Pushed to pyrotechnic levels by the astonishing south Indian virtuoso, McLaughlin summoned up some of his best work in years during this incendiary tour. "I actually first saw Srinivas 15 years ago," says McLaughlin. "I got a video of him playing when he was 14 years old. He was phenomenal then, and he's phenomenal now."

Remembering how nonchalantly McLaughlin dropped quotes from John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and George Gershwin's "Summertime" into an extended raga during the Remember Shakti performance at Symphony Space, I point out how organically he is able to shift gears from jazz vocabulary to the language of Indian classical music. But he immediately corrects me. "Well, it's not really shifting gears," he explains. "It's just music. I mean, look at my life. I'm involved in the Indian culture, I was a disciple of Sri Chinmoy for five years . . . without India I wouldn't be who I am today. But I'm also a jazz musician. So it's different, but it's not different, because in the end, it's just music. It's like Zakir. He grew up with classical Indian music, but he spent a major part of his time in the West and he's played with everybody from John Handy to the Grateful Dead. He loves Western music as much as I love Indian music. So in the end, what's unnatural? If it's unnatural, just don't do it."

McLaughlin's remarkable journey is far from over. On the immediate horizon are some ballets, probably involving the new young flamenco star Vicente Amigo, whom McLaughlin calls "the heir to Paco's legacy." And after that, expect more from this restlessly creative spirit.

"I guess I can say my life's been dedicated to music, and I guess it will be until the end," says McLaughlin. "But that's part of the deal of being a musician. You can't just put it on the back burner, especially with guitar. Guitar is really a bitch. Just to keep the level that you had, you've gotta work." He smiles as he quotes the old adage: "If you don't practice for a day, you know it. If you don't play for a few days, your colleagues know it. And if you don't practice for a week, everybody knows it!

"Nothing is static," McLaughlin reflects. "Every day is different. But [guitar] is a love affair that's been going on for the last 40-something years. And if you love something that much, of course you have to hate it. And if you want to evolve, then you've gotta really work."

Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, February 2000, No. 86. That issue also contains a transcription of John McLaughlin's arrangement of "Blue in Green" by Miles Davis, plus a John McLaughlin discography and timeline.