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some of jm music went in one ear and didn't even come out the other..
and some did tickle & delight my ears...
BUT...if his 'my goals beyond' record was all i'd ever heard by him, just for that one record he'd be among my fave musicians...one of those recordings that always delights as much as it did on first listen...
just luck: the first time i ever heard JM was in tony williams lifetime, with larry young on organ...at the rutgers (new brunswick, NJ) jazz festival, 1968 or 69...a high-schooler, trying to learn 'folk music' on my acoustic guitar, i knew next to nothing about jazz but a friend liked jazz, played flute....he said 'let's go hop over the fence, get in for free"...so we did...JM was playing the psychedelic-painted mustang...tony williams was doing some incantory 'singing'/chanting/'spoken word'/'rapping' vocalizing atop the sounds...i'd never heard ANYTHING like that music...the audience was pretty hostile: booing, catcalls.....tony at one point sang 'where am i going?" and some heckler hollered "i hope you're going to get off the stage soon"....
later, learning his history, i realized the performance must have been very soon after JM first came to the USA.
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02-03-2014 11:58 AM
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this is Alessio Menconi with a Johnny Smith
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that's nice, we've seen Alessio here before. but why is it posted in the JM thread? shouldn't it be posted in The Players section?
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There's actually a video of Alessio soloing alone with Billy Cobham on Youtube. While it is nice it is a shadow of the intensity between Mclaughlin and Billy.To the few who were there it was just magical but seems to lose the historic context now. Other than that there seems to be no connection to this thread.
Last edited by WESTON; 04-13-2015 at 01:24 AM.
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I like very much Joey DeFrancesco and Elvin Jones too. JM... I guess it's a thread to answer the question wether you like him or not. I can only say that nothing I ever heard from him inspired me in any way at all. I've heard music from some members on this forum that inspired me 100 more than JM ever did.(obviously the people that are nowhere close to JM in fame status). And I'm coming from the rock background! Anyway... all subjective of course.
Originally Posted by kris
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Johnny McLaughlin...Electric Guitarist is my favorite recording by John. I can't say he directly influenced my style but I surely have enjoyed listening to him play over the years in various contexts. Love what he did on the Abstract Logix Live CD.
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I believe that his best years started in the 90s, although his explosiveness in earlier periods was great fun. Some disagree about that last point. So be it.
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Huge admirer of John in all his periods. I can't imagine anyone serious about music who couldn't see his incredible stature as a musician.
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I just played with a drummer who said that jazz musicians gave JM the nickname, "The White Russian".
I asked him why, and he said 'because he always be rushin'.
Ginger Baker fired him from the Graham Bond Organization for that reason.
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From Ginger Bakers' official website.
"Graham however, never lost his capacity to make the life of the band interesting to say the least as they continued to gig & gather a large following around the UK. Ginger by this time had a heroin habit that he was struggling to get under control and after one stressful tour he lost his temper with McLaughlin, who left the band, causing them to lose, in Ginger’s words ‘a great guitar player’ & himself ‘a great friend’. Nevertheless, they were all delighted when tenor sax player & former close friend & band mate Dick Heckstall-Smith agreed to step into the breach & the most successful & influential incarnation of the GBO was born."
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Originally Posted by sgcim
yeah, yeah, same old stuff from the JM haters. you have to go back to the 70s, 60s even.
along these same lines, isn't it something how much Wes sucked on his first few recordings? yep, clearly an underdeveloped artist and player. sloppy, and what not.
and how about Benson and his early schlocky recordings? Bare minimum riffing solos on Sunny and Everyone Knows it's Wendy etc. jazz mediocrity defined.
of course they got better, brilliant even, but then I probably shouldn't mention that, since the incessant JM critics won't do the same for John.Last edited by fumblefingers; 04-14-2015 at 09:13 PM.
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I can't argue with what you said here, only where does JM fits into the picture? He's not 'new thing' since early 70's, and most def. not the hippest. Maybe he was, but after the generation of John Scofield, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and other players showed up on the scene, he's become irrelevant as a leading edge, progressive jazz player, no? (He always gets the top notch players in his bands, I'd give it to him.) I would even go further and say Charlie Christian is hipper today than JM. It's just my own observation, based on coversations with other guitar players. But ultimately, like I said, what matters is he doesn't matter to me. Originally Posted by fumblefingers
Usually, I follow the rule if no good things to say, better shut up, but this didn't look like JM appreciation thread, but rather an open question to see who likes JM and who doesn't and why
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no that's not right. he hasn't been a kid since the early 70s. his work is still more ambitious, and his writing is still more hip than the lesser players that you listed (Scofield and Frisell).
Scofield is now a jam band rocker and Frisell plays Beatles, Beach boys, and country, with sounds effects. Geez Louise.
In truth, the "new" thing is represented by people like Mary Halvorson, Nir Felder, Julian Lage, and others. Of course none of them are fit to carry JM's water bucket guitar wise, but that's another story. Halvorson does an updated version of older, outside players, so how "new" is it really? (Ornette, James Blood Ulmer?).
But back to your point - swing.
I can't say that I hear too much swing with Halvorson or Felder. (that was an understatement, in case that wasn't obvious).
So, this is consistent with what I said above.
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For me personally John McLaughlin is way more tha a guitarist that has exceptional abilities both technically and musically. He like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane,Django,Jaco, etc. embodies the song itself and all aspects of it. He is totally original and is able to converse with other genres of music and still sound like himself. One of the true great artists!
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I appreciate JM for what he is, a great fusion guitarist. If it doesn't swing, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not good jazz. Rock and fusion don't swing, they funk, something totally different.
I read the recent JM biography, "Bathed In Lightning", and it's a good history of the 60s rock and fusion scene, but it's made clear that Johnny Mac was never really a jazz guitar player, in the traditional sense of the term.
This is made explicit by Rick Laird, the bass player from Mahavishnu, but also the upright bass player in the house band at Ronnie Scott's, where he played with Wes Montgomery, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins and many other jazz greats.
Laird says that he never considered JM a jazz guitar player back in the 60s and 70s, and he still doesn't consider him a jazz guitar player today.
He said this was because he lacked the jazz vocabulary and repertoire that say, Jim Hall had, and JM would not be able to play a jazz gig with someone like Art Farmer.
Obviously, Laird thought JM was a great musician, just not a great jazz musician.
The quotes about "The White Russian" and Ginger Baker's opinion of JM in the Graham Bond Organization are not from me (I read the Baker quote in "Cream, The First Supergroup" book), I was just quoting other peoples' opinions.
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hilarious to see people criticize the Mahavicious. a venerable institution unto himself, listen to his recordings, his playing, slow that shit down if you think he's just running the numbers; he adapted the grammar of bebop into a guitar-specific language for modern improvisation. his vocabulary is completely unique, though in many ways parallels the approach Martino independently developed (imo, I've studied both to a fair degree, and it really concerns more with their line-conception rather than the articulation, though both of em pick everything). his contribution to the instrument and to music is really beyond debate.
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I had the pretty much the same take as you, sgcim, until a few months ago when someone gave me a copy of this:
Amazon.com: Danny Thompson: Live 1967: Music
I was quite surprised, because 1967 JM had a much better command of bebop than I expected. True, he's not Jim Hall, but he's not a stranger to the idiom either, and has considerably more vocabulary than his later work suggests. I still agree with your overall assessment, "great fusion guitarist", but I give him credit for having more to "fuse" than many.
I think you can find this on youtube. It's not great, but definitely worth a listen.
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I haven't heard that, but I've heard most of the other jazz records JM played on in the 60s, which were mentioned in the discography of the book "Bathed In Lightning", and JM was still playing the kind of modal jazz fusion that he's always played.
He played on Gordon Beck's "Pops" LP, a Johnny Dankworth LP, and played a bunch of standards with a pianist, and he sounds the same as I mentioned above.
The author of the JM bio seemed annoyed that Terry Smith, a guitarist who was playing in the Wes Montgomery/hard bop style of the 60s, won the Melody Maker Jazz Poll as best Jazz Guitarist in 1967 and 1968.
As a kid, I listened to the fusion guitarists of the 60s, Coryell and JM, and they both claimed to listen to Tal Farlow and other jazz guitarists, but I've never found any examples of them playing in that style.
Coryell admitted in his Autobiography that he couldn't play bop back in the 60s and 70s. He said that like JM, he played the modal jazz that Coltrane played. Later on, he got into bop. I'm sure JM must play some bop by this time, but he was doing something new in the 60s and 70s.
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That's exactly how I saw it - they were "jazzy" or jazz-aware, but not really capable of playing straight ahead without the fusion fallback. The Thompson CD forced me to rethink JM. It's not great and he does take some of the kind of liberties you hear on "Extrapolation" and other things he did back then, but there are moments that are much more in the pocket than anything I would have ever expected to hear from him. Originally Posted by sgcim
If you don't wan't wade through the whole CD, check out "Celia":
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I agree with you. He was able to restrain himself from from playing all his polyrhythms, pentatonics, tritones (although he did a little of that) and find the pocket much better than a guy like Coryell could back then. Originally Posted by unknownguitarplayer
I've been looking for that album ever since I read about it in "Bathed In Lightning"; thanks for posting that!
Danny Thompson and Tony Roberts were mofo's!
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Originally Posted by AleikhBaba
not sure about 3rd rate martino, but definitely sounds like a busier Carlos Santana
is it good?
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He's super-imposing other chords over the one basic chord they're playing on- Santana never did that. Originally Posted by AleikhBaba
not sure about 3rd rate martino, but definitely sounds like a busier Carlos Santana
He's also playing long, connected, bop-like lines- something Santana never did either.
I only posted that to show that Smith could burn in a rock setting, also: besides the jazz setting I posted before.Last edited by sgcim; 04-17-2015 at 04:41 PM.
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Great! JM sells music with Coltrane tunes fantastic! Originally Posted by fumblefingers
...but I transcirbe solos of PM...:-)and JM transcribed Tal Farlow solos...:-)
"...the day when Coltrane beacame a robot..."
Last edited by kris; 04-19-2015 at 01:57 AM.
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For fans of John Mclaughlin rock version of John Lewis/MJQ/-Django.
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I have seen both Terry Smith and John McLaughlin, and on balance I probably enjoyed the Terry Smith gigs more. He was a very fluent player with propulsive time and a touch of Wes. Once I saw him with altoist Peter King, and he held his own against Peter, which is no mean feat for a guitarist.
I saw McLaughlin playing acoustic guitar with Jonas Hellborg on bass and Trilok Gurtu on percussion. I liked some of it, but after a while the sheer speed and number of notes got a bit relentless.
I do regard McLaughlin as a major figure and I have quite a few of his CDs, from Mahavishnu to more recent stuff, but these days I find I can only listen to a couple of tracks on each one.
The one thing of his I do like all the way through is After the Rain with Elvin Jones and Joey de Francisco.
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