Mahavishnu Orchestra
The Lost Trident Sessions

THE REVIEW

The release of this album is from 1999, but the music it contains dates back to 1973. Certainly not an uncommon event in the fate of musical recordings, there was a serendipitous resurrection of a couple of multi-track reels, forgotten for a quarter of a century on the shelves of a record company's storeroom. A passing producer discovered them, became fascinated, and dutifully took it upon himself to have them mixed, mastered, and released to the market.

But what happened in 1973? After a couple of albums that were well received, which had elevated the Mahavishnu Orchestra's fusion quintet to the pinnacle of virtuosity applied to rock(jazz), the musicians began to argue.

The issue was that the group leader, English guitarist John McLaughlin, refused to include compositional contributions from other members of the quintet in the repertoire—all exceptional musicians, full of ambition. The situation then degenerated; McLaughlin ended up dissolving the group, and the new tracks recorded in the studio for the successor of the excellent and well-sold album “Birds of Fire” (early 1973) remained in the drawer.

However, there was a contractual obligation to fulfill with the record company, namely the release of one last work. Fortunately, some new pieces had already been part of the live setlist for some time, and there was a fresh performance available on tape from Central Park in New York, which included three of them. So the legal issues were resolved by releasing a live album at the end of '73, titled “Between Nothingness & Eternity,” containing the aforementioned three new pieces from Central Park and nothing else, after which everyone went their separate ways.

A quarter of a century later, here is the gem for the old and new(?) admirers of the '70s jazz-rock combo led by the ex-guitarist of Miles Davis. The disc contains six tracks, the three already known for their live versions plus three others, completely unpublished. Three tracks are by McLaughlin (one unpublished), the rest divided one each among the violinist (American) Jerry Goodman, the bassist (Irish) Rick Laird, and the keyboardist (Czech) Jan Hammer. The only one left out was the drummer (Panamanian) Billy Cobham: it's worth noting, there hasn't been a more globalized group than this!

The two things I feel like saying are these: the masterpiece of the album remains “Trilogy” (it was, even on “Between Nothingness...” live): the introductory 12-string electric arpeggio is stunningly beautiful, in a bizarre odd-time, and the refrain, a pursuit among the three soloists, is equally so. The piece is obviously structured in three movements, and even the second is initially remarkable: over a different arpeggio by McLaughlin, violin and bass “sing” a beautiful theme in unison, which then degenerates with the arrival of the full-throttle drums. The inevitable solos in rotation, nerve-wracking, with a competition to see who can churn out more notes per second, lengthen the broth, losing a little momentum, but then the sudden return of the initial arpeggios, so spacious and open and harmonic, is beautiful, counterpointed at great speed, but in a different way from the beginning, by all the musicians of the quintet.

The second and last thing to say is that McLaughlin doesn't warm me up all that much... his guitar style, which does not include legato (each note a pluck), and avoids expressive bends and vibratos (and when he does them they are imprecise, “dirty” and sometimes out of tune) seems to me lacking, not very exciting. The man unleashes volleys of notes worse than Malmsteen (but the latter is very precise and clean, at least). He does it in jazz rather than metal, but they're always runs up and down the fingerboard, epidermically spectacular but empty.

However, “Trilogy” is just beautiful, and here it’s not only McLaughlin, there's the extrairdinarie drummer Cobham, the virtuoso Goodman on electric violin, there’s virtuosity, improvisation, total cohesion between very brilliant musicians. For those who appreciate...