John McLaughlin - This Is The Way I Do It - Your evaluation please...

[unknownguitarplayer]

He has some bop pedigree.

He definitely does.

[sully75]

I still haven't found a ton of JM jazz playing I love but this track always gets me. Plays to his strength definitely.

[Moonray]

What about "New York On My Mind" on the same album?

Shades of the original Orchestra on their first album.
Emotion, raw power and then the softer interlude.

Then there's the solo guitar version of "My Foolish Heart" at the end of the album.

[Jazzjourney4Eva]

Sully - Seriously? Did you miss the 90’s?

[Litterick]

The last time we were happy.

[sully75]

Sully - Seriously? Did you miss the 90’s?

Internet wise? I mean, I miss the time before the internet dropped all our IQs 20 points, when I was still able to read books, before I heard the term "monitized", etc, yeah.

What's weird to me is the unarchived-Ness of the internet. People would put hard work into blogs and other stuff about something they were into. A specific camera or boat, or music or poetry. It would be excellent content. Then eventually they would get bored and maybe stop and then eventually stop paying for the web hosting and poof! All gone forever.

[ccroft]

I hear you Sully. See Dutchbopper's Jazz Guitar Blog while you still can!

[charleyrich99]

There's another side to the relationship between JM and Miles as described in the Jazz Times interview, John McLaughlin On Miles Davis In JazzTimes | Miles Davis Official Site

McLaughlin talks about how Miles gave him money to eat and pay rent. I get the feeling there were two sides of Miles, one shown to the public and one to his colleagues.

--Charley

[James W]

I get the feeling there were two sides of Miles, one shown to the public and one to his colleagues.

More than two, doubtless - there was also (at least) one to women.

[James W]

Newly released footage from 1970 of The Tony Williams Lifetime with John McLaughlin, Larry Young and Jack Bruce!

[James W]

For those curious about McLaughlin's playing of standards, this performance of 'Nica's Dream' cropped up on my youtube home page just now. Then I clicked on the uploader and discovered this version of 'Autumn Leaves' -

The Mike Carr Trio with John McLaughlin - Nica's Dream - 1966

[Hep To The Jive]

I've seen it - not all of it mind you, I couldn't bear to sit through too much of that white noise....anyway it's just JM playing his typical scalar stuff over chords. The approach is 95% scalar (like his playing). Awful incoherent soloing with no arc, no development of ideas, stiffest feel, heavy handed picking....As you can tell I wasn't impressed. But then I never cared one whit for that brand of soulless "white" music, so take my opinion with a huge grain or two of salt...

it's geared to more advanced players

HE "analyses" his own soloing at points. It's so funny to see. JM doesn't play solos that can be analysed because they dont make sense, so it's funny to see him try to pretend that there is a "point" to his solos. So he actually struggles along trying to talk about motifs etc etc, but it's pointless because it's just not there, and then he just resorts to reporting which scale he is using over which harmony which is all his playing ever really consists of.

hahaha where is Richb, i like that guy!

[thefrenchowl]

Hi, new to this forum... I was just browsing this forum and saw this topic...

I have known of John McLaughlin since 1969 when I purchased for some unknown reason a French pressing of only half of the double LP of The Tony Williams Lifetime EMERGENCY... So entralled was I that I managed via the local small town record shop to get the full american copy of the works a few months after... I still have it and can honestly say, despite all its flows, that it is one of my all time 10 greatest musical outpourings... I did not knew any of the three lads before, in fact, it's Tony Williams who put me onto Miles Davis.

Over the following years, I had Devotion, Extrapolation and a few Mahavishnu and Miles Davis LPs but I can't remember any of them!!!

And all the while that EMERGENCY double LP is sitting quietly on the bottom shelf behind me as I write...

And it took all 6 pages until post 135 to have someone mention The Lifetime...

It is not fair!!!

I will not say a bad thing about John, I sort of parted with him way before the mid 70s...

I went to see him and his band last year at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester GB, near where I live now. There were four of them on stage and I sort of enjoyed the set... BUT... in the deepest curls of my brain, I could not help me thinking that John looked too much in control, like if there was a censor or filter between what his brain would like to do and what his fingers were doing, preventing him from letting rip like other great players can do... And the other three on stage did rip better than him... Don't ask me their names, I do not know!!!

Patrick