Legendary guitarist John McLaughlin, whose fusion of jazz, rock and spirituality is captured on a new live box-set, talks to Stuart Nicholson
Where Yorkshireman John McLaughlin gets his vigour and enthusiasm from is anybody's guess. The 62-year-old guitarist who brought jazz-rock into the world alongside Miles Davis in the late Sixties has remained the scrupulous eclectic. In recent times he has toured the US and Europe with his Remember Shakti group, an east-meets-west fusion of Indian music and jazz, recorded a symphonic piece he calls Thieves and Poets, and released a monster 17-CD box-set called John McLaughlin: Montreux Concerts.
It was 18 months ago when the idea of releasing a set that virtually anthologises 25 years of his musical life through his appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival was put to him.
"I was delighted!" he laughs. "I am honoured! Truly honoured!" Recorded at Montreux between 1974 and 1999, Montreux Concerts sees McLaughlin performing in a remarkably diverse series of ensembles - the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti, The One Truth Band, Chick Corea, Paco de Lucia, The Free Spirits, Carlos Santana, Remember Shakti and The Heart of Things band.
In a career that has never marked time, getting him to stop and take stock of these achievements takes some doing. Yet when we get to speak, McLaughlin is remarkably down-to-earth. Tanned and youthful-looking with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, it's clear he loves talking music. He has perfect recall of a career in the top echelons of jazz, which he relates with warmth and self-deprecating wit.
He is quick to point out how he much prefers live recording to playing in a studio. And on Montreux Concerts the enthusiastic response he gets from the audiences is rewarded with some stunning performances throughout this unique collection. Each ensemble seems to designed to reveal a little more of his musical personality, and throughout McLaughlin delivers - he is, after all one of the greatest guitarists on the planet. When, in 1971, after recording with Miles Davis and drummer Tony Williams, he formed his own jazz-rock band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it lit up the night sky for almost two years. Allegro was for wimps; everything was played at 500 mph and the quietest the band played was treble forte. It left audiences in awe, then suddenly it was gone.
McLaughlin, who during his early days on the London jazz scene worked with Graham Bond and Georgie Fame as well as doubling as a session musician recording with the likes of Tom Jones and David Bowie, stunned the jazz and rock worlds with Mahavishnu. The speed of his execution and the depth of his harmonic understanding made it seem as if John Coltrane had metamorphosed into a lead guitarist.
Montreux Concerts opens in 1974, with the second version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. "When I put that band together I had just done Apocalypse with George Martin and the London Symphony Orchestra," recalls McLaughlin. "I was thinking big - 80 musicians - which I reduced to 11 to tour. I was experimenting; it was a little silly in a way, but we're all entitled to our follies. But by the summer of '75 I just wanted to concentrate more and more on the work I was doing with Shakti."
Shakti was an acoustic quartet he had formed with three Indian musicians, combining jazz with traditional ragas and rhythmic patterns from north and south India. Like Mahavishnu, the tempos were fast, the metres intricate, the percussion intense and the solos played with over-the-top virtuosity.
"We started doing these very small concerts in schools and churches and by 1975, I had pulled away from loud jazz-rock-fusion in favour of playing with my Indian friends and Shakti." But after touring the world, McLaughlin again sought change. It is the leitmotif of this 17-CD set.
"I'm not sure why, but I get restless very quickly," he says. "I'm a restless musician, continually searching. I don't know why I do it either, some people are very happy, they get one thing going, and it just keeps going for them. I'm changing hats, changing forms and I'm experimenting with this and that and I never really know why." After Shakti came the in-the-pocket jazz-rock of the One Truth Band, but even then he was planning a move.
"In late '78, I heard Paco de Lucia on the radio for the first time, I said 'Who is this guy?' And I got in touch with him right away. I called him and said 'I'd love it if we could work together, not just make a record, but if we can find a way to tour together; if it works out, it would be great!' I was in Paris and he came up from Madrid. We sat down and played and it was a wonderful learning experience for me. We had a great time and I suggested bringing \ Larry Coryell in, to make it more interesting." The famous guitar trio would travel the world, their virtuosity redefining the scope and role of the acoustic guitar, culminating in Meeting of the Spirits, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall in February 1979. In mid-1980, Al DiMeola replaced Coryell and in December that year they recorded the best-selling Friday Night in San Francisco. "We had phenomenal success in '81 with Friday Night In San Francisco. Maybe too much success as Al caused a kind of conflict. So Paco and I said we'll just get another guitar player!"
After the acoustic guitar trio, McLaughlin wanted to get back to jazz. "I wanted to go back and play more electric guitar," he laughs. "So I went back to my roots with a Hammond organ trio we called the Free Spirits. It reminded me of my early days, playing in Ronnie Scott's with the Mike Carr Trio with Jackie Denton on drums; that was some trio, I tell you!" His 1990s ensembles included Remember Shakti, which revisited his Indo-jazz fusion concept, and a contemporary jazz-rock band he called the Heart of Things. In all, McLaughlin performed 15 times at Montreux in four different venues and with forty-four different musicians, revealing a world view that invariably underpins any great artistic personality.
Add to all this his latest album, Thieves and Poets, also out now, an ambitious symphonic project with the I Pommeriggi Musicali di Milano orchestra conducted by Renato Rivolta, and the breadth of this remarkable musician's talent becomes clear.
"Thieves and Poets is a very big work," he says. "It's basically a piece for guitar and symphony orchestra. I've been very lucky, my whole life has been to experiment, I can't seem to stop, it's the story of my life - experiment and make records of my experiments." Already he's planning his next project, and another new direction. "It's going to be wild," he says with a grin.
John McLaughlin: Montreux Concerts (Warner Bros) and Thieves and Poets (EmArcy) are released this month