John McLaughlin
Industrial Zen

There are heroes and anti-heroes. There are those who love to show off and those who don’t. But there are also middle grounds, which need to be sought in those characters who first experience great emotional surges, only to retreat into their shells, almost fleeing, out of fear of their own actions, their fleeting exuberance, and their emotions. I believe John McLaughlin belongs to this group. This great guitarist is a hero, even epic, when he produces, but an anti-hero when he retreats, when he disappears. It must be so, otherwise, his coming and going from the musical world wouldn’t be understandable. In 2006, after a long period of discographic silence, with a brief pre-announcement, this record popped up.
The author's own premises were oriented toward a significant change. Almost to put his hands forward, he warned that musically, things would be very different. Then the album was released and ...

The choice of title is fundamental: Industrial Zen is a clear contradiction in terms, what is defined as an "oxymoron". The contradiction lies between the external inner peace of Zen, and the chaotic industrial turbulence on the other. Ancient and modern together, inside and outside, emotions and coldness. Practically that same duality of his character. So it's necessary to understand whether this duality in the musical aspect has also generated a Janus-faced record with two sides that can coexist in a single corpus. Despite everything, I believe so. And yet the album lives with an astonishing coherence, an intrinsic balance shaped on the Golden strength of the notes and, if I may offer a strong opinion, we are facing the best work of a mature McLaughlin, standing alongside that Extrapolation of 1969, which is still today his most astonishing insight.

Industrial Zen, in its complexity, in its elevation, has powerful, elegiac, even bucolic traits. It knows how to make jazz rock a material to be molded around a guitar that is never tired, never presumptuous, and never predictable. It can be new in a world of already said things, squeezing and expressing as much as the material still has to give.

Furious in its opening dedicated to Jaco Pastorius ("For Jaco"), with two drums intersecting, complementing each other, and offering themselves reflectively to the tight rhythmic game (Mark Mondesir and Gary Husband), from which John steps back to offer the solo dish to a masterful Bill Evans and takes a memorable revenge only in the following "New Blues Old Bruise" with a long, flowing solo like hair on a beloved's shoulders, around the fractured rhythms of a marvelous Colaiuta. The album offers a great desire for Weather Report, with many moments of reminiscence where the paths flourish with Shorter ("Wayne's Way"). There is an electric experimental phase, in which the author wants to play with synths and artificial rhythms ("Just So Only More So") and where the atmosphere becomes rarefied, the percussion becomes soft, before the new rhythmic-guitarist explosion, where a bass throbs and the sax allows itself jazz funky breaks. There is room for nature and world music, for the earthly pulse, for distant voices ("Mother Nature"). There is a "Senor C.S." dedicated to a great guitarist friend, imbued with percussion as only Santana, indeed, knew how to do. In short, an inexhaustible forge of ideas and insights that refuse to end, an engaging and astonishing band for its technique, preparation, and humanity. An album to own.

sioulette