John McLaughlin is a guitarist and composer celebrated for his eclectic forays into jazz rock and Indian music. His Mahavishnu Orchestra blended Eastern and Western musical traditions, making “guitar hero” McLaughlin the father of 1970s fusion and a pioneer on the world music scene.
McLaughlin was born into a musical family on January 4, 1942, in Yorkshire, England. Encouraged by his mother, who was a violinist, he studied piano from age nine. Then, inspired by blues and swing artists, he began playing guitar at age 11. Until 1969, he played in British rock, free jazz, and blues bands such as Géorgie Fame’s Blues Flames, the Graham Bond Organization, and Brian Auger’s Trinity. His prize-winning first album Extrapolation appeared in 1969.
McLaughlin moved to New York in 1969 and joined the influential jazz group Lifetime. That same year, he accompanied trumpeter Miles DAVIS on Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, two jazz-rock albums that were credited with sparking the 1970s fusion guitar movement. Guitar Player magazine later called him the “de facto father of that genre … the first jazz guitarist to play complex altered scales, stinging bent notes and odd meters on a distorting solid body (electric guitar) at ear ringing volumes.”
Apart from the influences of blues, swing, and jazz greats like Davis, John COLTRANE, Muddy WATERS, and Django REINHARDT, McLaughlin was inspired by one of India’s foremost musicians, Ravi SHANKAR. Experimentation with rhythms from the subcontinent lead to jam sessions with Indian musicians for the 1970 album My Goals Beyond. This fusion evolved with the birth of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971. The band wandered between jazz and rock, releasing the albums The Inner Mounting Flame, Birds of Fire, and Between Nothingness and Eternity, before breaking up in 1973. McLaughlin, with Jean-Luc Ponty, revived the group in 1974 only to see it disbanded in 1975; a third incarnation, with saxophonist Bill Evans in the mid-1980s, was even shorter-lived.
McLaughlin’s commitment to Indian music didn’t die with Mahavishnu, and in the mid-1970s he swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic one to form the indo-jazz group Shakti. The group lasted only three years but was an important influence on the nascent world music scene, producing albums including Natural Elements and A Handful of Beauty.
For the next two decades, McLaughlin’s activities were varied and intense, and he continued to embrace both the electric and acoustic guitar. Starting in 1988 (parallel to other activities) he toured the world for five years with the widely acclaimed John McLaughlin Trio, which fused electric bass and Indian percussion.
McLaughlin appeared on dozens of albums with Al DiMeola, Miles Davis, Chick COREA, SANTANA, and other rock and jazz musicians. Beginning in 1993, he toured and played electric guitar with Joey DeFrancesco (Hammond organ) and Dennis Chambers (drums) in the Free Spirits, a jazz trio. He also released a homage to jazz pianist Bill EVANS, playing his idol’s music on six acoustic guitars. The years 1995–96 brought renewed recording collaborations with Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco DeLucía. In the late 1990s he showed no sign of slowing, dedicating his energies to varied parallel efforts and collaborating with other artists on many albums.
Brett Allan King
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; JAZZ; JAZZ ROCK; SWING.
Berg, C. “John McLaughlin: Evolution of a Master” (Down Beat, vol. xiv, no. 12, 1978, p. 14);
Menn, D., and C. Stern. “John McLaughlin: After Mahavishnu and Shakti, A Return to Electric Guitar” (Guitar Player, vol. xii, no. 8, 1978, p. 40);
Ferguson, J., ed. The Guitar Player Book (New York: Grove Press, 1983).
Extrapolation; My Goals Beyond; Miles Davis: Bitches Brew; In a Silent Way; Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire; The Inner Mounting Flame; Shakti: Natural Elements; Shakti with John Mclaughlin.