Mahavishnu Orchestra
Between Nothingness & Eternity

The album is live, specifically taken from a summer concert in New York's Central Park, but it has the peculiarity of containing completely unreleased material at the time (1973): the explanation is that the band was having a fierce argument, to the point of preventing the release of these newly composed tracks, which were regularly recorded in the studio along with other material, thus forcing the record label to arrange for a concert version to be released while these songs were steadily entering the band's performance setlists.

The dispute was between the bandleader, namely guitarist John “Mahavishnu” McLaughlin, and three of the four musicians accompanying him, namely pianist/synthesist Jan Hammer, violinist Jerry Goodman, and bassist Rick Laird. The issue revolved around the trio's dissatisfaction with having a subordinate role in terms of composition. The studio sessions of that year saw a rise in the creative contribution of all three, and they wanted all four composers to be credited in the upcoming album.

McLaughlin did not share this view, considering the Orchestra his project and the musicians alongside him as substantial collaborators and executors of his vision and inspiration. Incidentally, his formidable drummer, the Panamanian Billy Cobham, stayed out of this tug-of-war, preferring to channel his compositional desires into a solo album, which turned out to be the right choice: his debut work “Spectrum,” contemporary to this album, is one of the totems of fusion music, much more famous, appreciated, and influential than this fairly forgotten and neglected album.

The tracks, all instrumental since we are in the fusion music sector and the quintet is without a singer, are only three. The best comes from the first side, with McLaughlin's intense and spectacular tripartite suite “Trilogy” and Jan Hammer's cadenced, syncopated, and vaguely crimsonian contribution “Sister Andrea”. This last track is, among other things, “trimmed” by about a minute, perhaps to fit it on the first side of the original LP without compromising recording quality, but remains a great piece, constituting, along with the preceding trilogy, the absolute pinnacle of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in my opinion. It's a pity, however, that the final track “Dreams,” which unfolds over the entire second side of the vinyl, does not offer the same thematic and harmonic richness, nor the same fiery intensity as what precedes it, resulting in something partially unresolved and, above all, too watered down (over twenty-one minutes).

But the first two contributions are spectacular… the Orchestra was truly a war machine, very powerful and fiery, and here you can feel all their impact on stage. There are no violinists like Goodman (I correct myself: perhaps, indeed certainly, one on his level is Simon House, former High Tide/Bowie/Hawkwind). Here live, sometimes, you might hear him hit a wrong note every now and then, but in terms of spirit, visceralness, conviction, and charm, his instrument truly excels and conveys great emotion. Then what to say about the sublime, eternal paradiddle of Master Cobham, a living legend about how to be constantly on the snare drum, continuously spreading accents, on strictly odd time signatures, keeping the bass drum almost as a color rather than the usual contrary, ultimately a thoroughbred of rhythm, with an amazing talent.

The leader McLaughlin is here at the best moment of his career: a great guitarist with his own convoluted yet intense and often surprising phrasing, but even more with a peculiar vision of jazz capable of expanding it into scenic and meaningful, even captivating, territories. Personally, however, I have a couple of reservations about his actual ability to bring out the best in himself with the amplifier set in a hard rock manner (nicely distorted) as was constantly the case in Mahavishnu: being from a jazz school, despite his incredible dexterity and agility, John shows evident shortcomings in taming the feedback generated by his guitar so distorted and noisy: this results in a “dirty” phrasing, partially clouding its musical quality.

Another point that has always struck me (or rather, my ear) when listening to him is his modest vibrato style, a basic phrasing component in rock, indeed let's say the most important. John “vibrates” little and poorly, again, because he learned to play the guitar “clean,” without much sustain, without a deep habit of “working” a string after plucking it, letting it resonate for entire seconds and continuing to move it to generate expressiveness from it. On this aspect, he is, moreover, in good company… there are other great guitarists (Steve Howe is an example) lacking in the same terms as our John.

For the record, the three debut songs on this live album saw the light in their original studio version in 1999 on a posthumous album titled "The Lost Trident Sessions" (along with three other completely unreleased tracks), thanks to a stroke of luck that allowed a record company employee to find the master recordings in the archives, unfortunately shelved for twenty-five long years after the quintet's disintegration at the end of 1973. Well, the live versions sound better, more visceral, more powerful, more dynamic, more real, more… rock, than this work here!