John McLaughlin & The One Truth Band - The Montreux Concerts disc 6 (July 19, 1978)
Chick Corea & John McLaughlin - The Montreux Concerts disc 7 (July 15, 1981)
Mahvishnu - The Montreux Concerts discs 8-9 (July 18, 1984)
In discussing some South American jazz rock groups in one of Tom’s posts, we discussed the inevitable dive the genre took in the late 70s and early 80s, so it seems the perfect time to delve into this section of the Montreux box set, something I’ve been amiss at doing because most of these sets don’t really hit the dartboard let alone the bullseye when it comes to my tastes.
The One Truth Band is the exception as it’s McLaughlin returning to jazz rock very briefly after his years in Shakti, bringing L. Shankar along with him. In fact, they open with “Meeting of the Spirits,” one of those classics you can pick out in a few notes. It’s quite the set overall, but I always feel something missing in McLaughlin’s jazz rock, usually a sense of being grounded, so it doesn’t surprise me that his post fusion projects tend to be much earthier. Having L. Shankar along is a bonus as always, I can only imagine what Mahavishnu might have been like with he rather than Jerry Goodman on the instrument. This set is likely the closest one will ever get to the idea.
I’ve probably mentioned before, but I’m not a huge fan of solo, duo and trio spots, possibly because I find so much musical appreciation in the reactions in an ensemble setting and find harmonic development a lot rarer. So I’m not really the audience for the duo shows of Corea and McLaughlin despite the sheer talent at work. For one thing, the project seems to be more a Corea sort of thing, like the solo spots that Romantic Warrior-era Return to Forever were doing in spots. Beautiful and virtuoso this stuff may be, but it generally leaves me a bit chilly.
The set then returns to more electric jazz-rock, but by the Jonas Hellborg Mahavishnu period (the set has this as Mahavishnu Orchestra but the lack of the Orchestra on the albums might have been due to copyright issues), the style had grown pretty sterile and most of this sounds like scale exercises with stale and dated tones. While the Montreux show certainly has a lot more fire than the studio work from this band, I find myself as numbed with it after 20 minutes as I am with anything Hellborg tends to be involved with. On my other blog I talk about olfactory fatigue with burning too much incense, it’s the same sort of thing with music of this sort, after enough of this virtuosity it ceases to have much meaning.