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Among the guitar heroes of the '70s, references to rock, hard rock, and prog rock stars abound (Page, Beck, Fripp, Blackmore, Howe, West, Allmann: here cited in no particular order and with some omissions), but the importance of the Scotsman John McLoughlin is overlooked, perhaps too often. He was already a collaborator of Alexis Korner, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix, and as both a solo artist and the leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, he authored some of the most significant works of contemporary music, perfectly balanced between jazz/fusion, hard rock, and Indian tradition.
The pinnacle of McLoughlin's career is perhaps characterized by the creation of the aforementioned Orchestra, a supergroup that united some of the most talented virtuosos of the time, authentic masters of their instruments hailing from the most varied corners of the world: on bass the Irishman Rick Laird, on keyboards the Czech Ian Hammer, on violin the American Jerry Goodman, and on drums the Panamanian Billy Cobham.
The music offered by the group in this first, and in my opinion, most convincing work, is an effective fusion of the quintet's various souls, which unfolds in consistently well-defined directions: the pieces are, in fact, a continuous flow of guitar chords (with a particularly open and "whirling" sound: it is said that McLoughlin was inspired by sitar players), often doubled and counterpointed by the violin's interventions, which impart an increasing sound tension to the individual tracks, with a role akin to that of the lead guitar in a normal rock band; alongside them, a thundering drum set stands out, the true rhythmic backbone of the individual pieces, with the task of making the band's sound more aggressive and less ethereal, accompanied by a less conspicuous bass than in other contemporary groups but effective in its rhythmic patterns. The role of the keyboards is particular, sometimes merely accompanying the other instruments in their sound excursions, remaining in the background, ascending to prominence in some more contemplative tracks, with an approach of jazzistic and improvisational ancestry, where the quality of the individual sound - and the emotion it creates in the listener - is more important than virtuosity for its own sake. This allows us to highlight what was probably the greatest virtue of McLoughlin's group, at least at its debut: the presence of many worthy musicians did not prevent the group from having a compact and cohesive sound, with a relative limitation of those solo interventions so cherished by the jazz from which much of the Orchestra's members hailed, achieving solutions of extreme compactness both on the melodic level and in the arrangements.
An ideal bridge between the various musical cultures of the early '70s, which struggles to be boxed into a single label, as well as a single section of a record store, and precisely for this reason represents a gem to be rediscovered, especially by the younger generations.
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