"You know the old adage," John McLaughlin smiled winningly, perched on
the bed of his neat-as-a-pin hotel room. "If you don't practice for a day,
you know it; if you don't play a few days, your colleagues know it; if you
don't play for a week, everybody knows it." With fondness and respect, he
lightly brushed his Ibanez acoustic laying within easy reach in its open
case.
"I feel nervous without a guitar," he admitted quietly. "It's part of my
body. I've felt that way since the beginning, since I first picked up a
guitar when I was 11 years old. That same day I was taking the guitar to
bed with me, so that gives you an idea what I feel about it."
To see McLaughlin brandish his instrument on-stage, one senses the guitar
was cast for him, as Excalibur was made for King Arthur, the hammer for
John Henry, the saxophone for Bird. Far from guessing McLaughlin's gone a
day or two in his life without fingering a fretboard, everybody knows one
thing about Mahavishnu: his Orchestra's been dormant too long.
Last fall McLaughlin and Warner Bros. corrected that, by issuing a
remarkable album titled simply Mahavishnu with a reconstituted Orchestra
(saxist Bill Evans, keyboardist Mitchell Forman, bassist Jonas Hellborg,
drummer Billy Cobham assisted by Danny Gottlieb, pianist Katia LaBeque, and
Indian musicians Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Zakir Hussain) and following it
up with a first-class U.S. tour.
"I've been asked a number of times why I called this group the Mahavishnu
Orchestra," McLaughlin explained patiently, "and for me, personally, the
kind of spirit that was established in my first ensemble with that name,
something I love very much, is now present in the new band. We play a
strong, joyful kind of music that's in the tradition, for me, of the old
band. Of course, I don't really want to go back and play the old
hits-though there are certain tunes that even the guys in the band want to
play-because there's so much new music that's been written, and that's been
my primary concentration. But I think on the next rehearsal we'll look at
some of the old tunes. Even so, they'll have to be re-arranged, because
we're not going to play them the old way."
**************************************
No one would expect simple revival, or any other form of stagnation, from
McLaughlin; he's been the "Go-ahead John" of so-called jazz-rock fusion
since bursting onto the American scene in the late '60s with the Tony
Williams Lifetime, with his own hallucinatory Devotion (recently reissued
by OAO/Celluloid) and ethereally acoustic My Goal's Beyond, then joining
Miles Davis to create In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and a
host of other electric extrapolations-not to mention Inner Mounting Flame,
Birds Of Fire, Between Nothingness And Eternity, all passionate products of
the first Mahavishnu Orchestra. An avatar's humility, dedication, and power
remained McLaughlin's hallmarks through the '70s as he restlessly met
Carlos Santana (Love Devotion Surrender), Jean-Luc Ponty (Visions Of The
Emerald Beyond), and the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson
Thomas' baton (Apocalypse).
Then there was his One Truth Band, the quasi-Indian Shakti, and several
albums of McLaughlin with a mixed bag of collaborators, featuring in turn
his electric guitar, his European sophistication, his virtuosic trio with
Paco De Lucia and Al Di Meola. Always new compositions, ever new challenges
overcome, finally the discovery of a musical invention that fires his
imagination-you guessed it: the digitally synthesized, computer-interfacing
electric guitar.
"I love the electric guitar," McLaughlin protested right out front. "For
certain things it's irreplaceable-but for other areas it's a little narrow,
not very subtle, misses a certain depth. So, for me, the Synclavier guitar
is actually a revolutionary instrument. It's infinite, as far as sounds are
concerned. It allows me to create sounds that are my own. It's not just
'okay, you've got some programs-play marimba, play tom-tom, play flute,
play this, play that.' There are, of course, sounds that are flute-like, or
brass-like. But more significantly there are sounds I've created, that are
very personal, that belong to me and have become my voice. I don't adopt
sounds arbitrarily and gratuitously-I hope to say something with this
instrument, because its capabilities are phenomenal. It's what I can do
with it that's really important."
"It's a Roland guitar, of which the electronics have been quite
extensively modified by New England Digital, the Synclavier people," he
said. Actually, all that makes it look different from a standard electric
axe is a cigar box-sized panel jutting out from the body below the strings.
"The programming's done at home, on the computer, with a keyboard on
which you can alter parameters and a terminal where you can do really
fine-tuned work. It offers 16 bytes in real-time sound, which is very
powerful, in computer terms. So you just start off with a fundamental, a
sine wave, and you go from there. You build. You can change the sine
wave-you can do anything with it, anything. I've been working on the
Synclavier for more than two years now, creating sounds and timbres; the
guitar's quite new, this year, but I've been waiting very impatiently for
it. Together, their capabilities are so big I feel I should continue to
work."
"On the guitar there are these modular buttons that allow you to address
the computer. Because you can record directly from the guitar if you want,
you can record in digital memory. You can play back; you can transpose; you
can assign a different timbre to each string, if you want. You can
pre-program sequences that you can play at any time; you can record on top
of it, if you want to play it back. You can call up your banks of
information-each bank, for example, can hold eight entirely different
timbres, and you have eight banks, so at any moment you have 64 entirely
different sounds. And the programming of the sounds is really up to you and
your imagination. Your imagination is really your tool."
"Learning how to use the computer was difficult, yeah, but I just hacked
away at it. You have to understand logic, the logic of computers, and know
how to figure them out-if you can't get what you want, how you can access
it. And then, how to manipulate the information, how to transform it, how
to work all the numbers-because it's numbers that transfer into sound."
"It's work," McLaughlin agreed, "but the results are most satisfying. The
sounds originate from the computer, finally, but I can trigger them either
from the keyboard or the guitar. And I think this is a credit to
Synclavier: when it's triggered by the guitar, it has a guitar feeling;
it's not a keyboard feeling at all. Through a terrific research program on
the guitar's peculiar characteristics, they've been able to translate this
weird information about the shape of the string's wave, its dynamics, into
digital information-an amazing thing to do."
"But I have to play," he stressed. "I have to do something with it.
That's my philosophy. What am I going to do with it? What does it say to
me? What does it touch in me? How do I feel about it? What can I give to
that?"
For initial answers to these questions, one must turn to his new album
and absorb the variety of sounds-each evoking some pre-mental
response-McLaughlin's designed. On "Radio-Activity", the opener, this
guitar screams like a missle's arc across the sky; on "Nostalgia" it's a
goatherd's lissome pipe, reedy high and full-blown low; on "When Blue Turns
Gold" one is hard pressed to distinguish between McLaughlin and Bill Evans'
flute (for most of the album, Evans on tenor or soprano offers a raw-edged
vocal tone in contrast and syncopation to McLaughlin's guitar; live as well
as on record, their duets soar). Forman and LaBeque on Minimoogs and
Prophet keyboards summon their own quite complex sounds, as (I assume) the
Olympic fanfare introducing Evans' composition "Clarendon Hills", and
Hellborg's bass, which he's adept at playing arco, has its own electric
sheen. In fact, it's a relief to hear McLaughlin use his good old Les Paul
Custom on "Nightriders"-maybe not Mahavishnu's most elaborate or ambitious
track, but a hot one nonetheless which, with the rave-up "East Side West
Side" and some other relentless passages, proves the guitarist's off-hand
and undetailed comment that the Mahavishnu Orchestra's music is "a
littleäcrazy."
Crazy in terms of unpredictable, inexplicable, highly energized, and even
sometimes wild. And better that McLaughlin should retain that willingness
to follow his musical whims than have packaged all his influences, from Tal
Farlow and classic bebop records through the British blues towards
Coltrane's jazz, then Ravi Shankar, Sri Chimnoy, and Miles, Chick, Keith,
Weather Report, flamenco, Western symphonic history-he asserted "the
barriers between pop and classical musics are really falling now"-into one
smooth formula. What will young listeners think of his experiments (and
those of Pat Metheny) with digitally synthesized sound?
"I hope they're going to hear the tradition behind it," he responded
immediately. "I believe nothing is contemporary unless you can feel the
tradition behind it." But what part of the tradition does he employ in
these experiments-or the earlier ones with form and amplification, in
league with Williams, Larry Young, and Miles? "I had my jazz discipline.
Without a discipline, I wouldn't know what I was doing. You have to have a
discipline, whether it's classical Western or classical Eastern or jazz or
rock & roll- though you don't need much theoretical background in harmony
or rhythm for rock.
"I believe," he went on thoughtfully, "if you listen to Shakti or the
Belo Horizonte album or the guitar trio LPs or Music Spoken Here-that's
just guitar. I'm a guitar player-that's what I am primarily; that's what
I'll always be. I like to write music, but a guitar player's all I ever
want to be. I want to be better and better, just as I want to be a better
person. I want to be more articulate; I want to be able to utilize space
better, to play silence more profoundly. There are many things left for me
to do; there is much work to be done. And that can all be accomplished on
acoustic guitar. Acoustic guitar will never die. It's impossible."
"I think the technological advance for guitars is similar to what's
happened to keyboards. You have keyboard synthesizers that are very much
part of contemporary music, because they're new instruments of tremendous
potential, and they stand on their own as instruments-they aren't a hybrid.
But I know when I speak to keyboard players, they still say there's no
comparison between an electronic instrument and a fine grand piano."
"Take someone like Joe Zawinul, a real flag-waver and leader in
synthesized work, one of the great innovators. He still plays acoustic
piano, and wants to more and more-for personal satisfaction, and expressive
capability, if you like. But he's not going to stop his research with the
synthesizer-and thank God he's doing it, because it's inspiring. He's
opening doors to us that wouldn't normally be open, that we wouldn't even
know existed. But because he's playing it, and it's music, doors open to
the listener, and I think that's wonderful. Hopefully, Pat and I will do
the same thing with this guitar."
"I must say that the guitars that are available so far for such synthesis
still lack some capacities, but it's so new. As the technology improves,
they too will improve; there's no doubt about it. As for me, the people
who've created the new instrument for guitar are the Synclavier people, but
I think we'll see in the next five years a really big evolution going on in
guitar synthesis."
And what about the kid who's inspired by this evolution but finds guitar
synthesizers far beyond his or her budget? "Well, before a kid wants to go
out and spend a lot of money on a guitar synthesizer, they've got a ton of
work to do on acoustic guitar. A five-dollar guitar can provide you with an
unbelievable amount of work. I think there are a number of keyboard
synthesizer players who don't have a lot of technical means, but have these
programs-and today's factory programs are becoming so complex and
interesting, software development is snowballing-but these people with
slight means are able to get a good sound and get by. From the playing
point of view, we have to distinguish the difference. It's one thing to
play sounds; it's another thing to play and play. A guitarist with a $15
acoustic has work cut out for him-it was the same for me, all those years
when I had this real cheap guitar."
"Now, I'll create a sound, and it will stir something in my imagination
that never happened before. Because of certain feelings it evokes in me, it
will put me in another place. But I can't just go out and play sound,
saying, 'Isn't it great?'
"The analogy I can make is to an artist's palette. With the synthesizer
guitar you have a large selection of colors, but what are you going to
paint is really the big question. You're not going to just throw sounds at
people-it's boring, and not even that: there's no meaning. BasicalIy, when
you play music, it's your life that you're really talking about, that's
expressing itself through music. That's why music's very rich, because it
comes from the life of people. And there are things spoken in music that
cannot be said vocally, or any other way for that matter. So we have to
keep the horse before the cart. Nothing can replace work in music, and
discipline. I can only speak personally, but these are my musical
parameters. When I'm listening to music, I want to feel the person's life;
I want to feel the personality, the character of the individual, and
individuals together."
"I think we learn everything from other people-everything, philosophy,
what we think. I need to be inspired in my life, and for me, all great
musicians are spiritual people-in fact, everybody's spiritual, really, and
music is the language of the spirit. That's it, if anything is-because
music speaks from the heart of the player to the heart of the listener. And
no, we don't care what language, what culture, what nationality-music
doesn't pay attention to any of those things-that's why music is so great.
So music, globally speaking, is the spiritual language. And everybody loves
music, so who doesn't have a spirit? Everybody wants to listen to music."
"My work in music is a work of the spirit; it's a development of my
spirit, and the development of myself as a human being," concluded
McLaughlin, who prefers to be more discreet about his spiritual and
religious enquiries than he was back in the days when he accepted the Hindu
name Mahavishnu. "These words 'spiritual' and 'religious' can be very
easily misunderstood. But what I really feel in my heart is that music is
higher than any religion, which is probably heretical to at least
half-a-dozen religions in the world, but be that as it may, that's what I
feel. We don't know if there's a God, but if there is a God, I think music
is the face of God."
Had we come far afield of discussing digital guitar synths? Not if
they're to be understood as keys to unlocking the music that people have
inside. "Religion's a paradox; I'm sure we all see that," sighed
McLaughlin. "If you have no religion, you probably revert to blatant
materialism, which must be sheer hell. But organized religion? I'm against
it. It divides people. The absurdity of it all is staggering-the less said,
the better." Far better to organize an orchestra, through hard work and
discipline, and practice one's own approach, every day, to inexplicable
music itself.
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