Prelude: John McLaughlin and the Mahivshnu Orchestra

… may you live in beginning

that there be a chance

The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Dawn” starts with a single transient played in unison by cymbal, keyboard and bass before the full ensemble begins the piece a beat later. Listening for the first time you might think that this stroke was the first beat of a bar, briefly disguising the 7/8-time, which settles intuitively into its signature by the second measure. It is actually the last beat of an otherwise inaudible count in. But the piece never gives up the loss that this lead in adds, and which the time signature subtracts. The music progresses as if it was a beat behind and while it never catches up it fills the space opened by the lag with the two extremes this band in particular inhabit in the double implication of its idiom. A serene ascending melody modulated through harmonic fourths is led by John Mclaughlin’s improvised guitar towards a whirling virtuosity in the ensemble, brisk choreography of sounds. The count off suggests a transition where the end of a section resolves into its home key. Formerly in classical and popular music, including the blues, this occurs with transition from the dominant or any of its substitutions to the home key as each passage resolves into the next. The jazz tradition, which typically suspends resolution—deploying modulations and arpeggiated chords across evanescent harmonic sequences—evolves in the shadow of this tactic as if it was an imperative. We hear it in the 20 years or so between the 1950s and 70s where diverse musicians under rubrics like free jazz, the new thing or the avant garde find different ways to substitute, for the standard changes of classical and popular music, soundscapes that relax restrictions on improvisation. The Mahavishnu orchestra in 1971 take things a step further. To play without restriction poses an immensely difficult challenge, for at first you must avoid at all costs the hint of melodic progression or harmonic resolution. If anything, the challenge imposes a greater restriction. Instead, a composition locates in the space of an interval the potential for further intervals, which each time aspire to the status of delayed transitions. You might try to understand the interval as transitional but without reference to either a previous or a consecutive state. Yet, at length, alternative harmonic soundscapes help to recover various kinds of melodic resolution. Mclaughlin builds his guitar solos at this time out of arpeggiated chordal structures, which he deploys either in the composition of meditative sequences or the execution of incredibly rapid ostinatos, scaling particles of sound that exceed anything previously heard on this instrument. If the traces of resolution remain strong in this music they do so in the form of the unfulfilled promise. Harmonic sequences cycle up through tonal intervals to culminate either in complete serenity or in virtuosic noise.

John McLaughlin, Mahavishnu Orchestra NYC 1974 by Jonathan David Sabin

The first recording by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the album Inner Mounting Flame, will be acknowledged as a significant event in the history of recorded music in the twentieth century, alongside recordings by Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John and Alice Coltrane.[1] Assembled: although Mclaughlin formed the Orchestra and wrote most of the compositions, the other members perform as leaders on their respective instruments. Five musicians (from five different countries): Jan Hammer (in exile from the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia) remains to this day preeminent as one of the few most notable keyboard performers of the last 60 years (on acoustic and electric piano as well as synthesizer). The Panama drummer Billy Cobham too demonstrates unbeatable technique and innovation. He can spontaneously create the heartbeat of a composition while nearly running it off its rails with combative precision. The violinist Jerry Goodman from Chicago—a last minute replacement for Jean Luc Ponty—turns out to be every bit as staggeringly virtuosic. And the Irish bass player, Rick Laird, performs with the same spontaneity and flair throughout the three years of this version of the band’s existence. The title “Dawn” (the second piece on the album’s first side) evokes the hours before the sun comes into view, risking a traditional cliché. Walter Kolosky, as part of his painstaking description of every Mclaughlin composition, portrays it like this:

The music bubbles up with the subtle electric piano of Jan Hammer introducing a new spring day. Drummer Billy Cobham provides a steady pulse. An intensifying head, played together by violinist Jerry Goodman and John McLaughlin, merges with Hammer’s delicate morning offering while Rick Laird builds on his bass theme. The refined tension, already inherent in the melody, quickly rises and then resolves as if to give permission for the early fog to lift. McLaughlin’s solo summons the listener to an electric hoedown. Goodman’s solo, supported by McLaughlin’s rapid-fire chord structures and Cobham’s drumming, is especially impressive. The primary theme is revisited as the full sun is seen on the horizon. (54).

And yes, while Kolosky’s description captures the core qualities that mark the music, and we can forgive his gently literal reading of the piece evoking the environmental phenomenon in an aural equivalent, the composition nevertheless guides our attention to something else that Kolosky constantly underlines in his notes. The soloists rise from the ensemble performance as a feature of the assembling. The musicians deploy their virtuosic qualities, which they demonstrate with ease, but their chief purpose is to help produce an event of connection that can carry the others with it. This kind of leading characteristic of the idiom relates to the conceit of an alchemical change that occurs when an ensemble comes together. The previous (first) piece on the album, “Meeting of the Spirits,” serves to do what its title indicates. And this lexicon, which informs the titles, tempts us into the world inhabited by McLaughlin, that of a spiritual practise in a precise sense: e.g., in the music of John and Alice Coltrane, and in McLaughlin’s case (though not the other musicians) the poetry and music as well as the practical regimens of Sri Chimnoy. More to the point it marks the rendezvous of musicians, each thoroughly characteristic in their own way of an idiom newly formed of elements from older idioms—classical music, experimental popular song, avant garde jazz, Indian raga—giving rise to the unfortunate rubric used at the time to describe it: fusion. Hence the second piece on the album: dawn. A dawn song aspires to carry the universe within which it arises beyond itself.

Now you could create a few scripts from a few bars of “Dawn” and feed them into an app, which would combine them in the randomised real time process of its self-learning algorithm and a new composition by the 1971 Mahavishnu orchestra will be ready in a few seconds on your streaming platform. Any educated listener might be taken in. But what aspiration and whose intention does the new “Dawn” manifest?

[1] And it isn’t even their best.