Mahavishnu Orchestra - Hunter College, New York 5/15/72
My opinion on the rise and fall of Mahavishnu Orchestra marks 1 and 2 might be a little different than most. For me the mark 1 band started out smokin’ hot and burnt out pretty quickly and it’s hard to fault John McLaughlin forming a new line up as the old one had grown terribly stagnant even by September 1972 and the European tour, which to my ears sounds like a bunch of instrumentalists having a musical pissing contest. My intuitive impression of this includes the usual stories of the band not getting along, but given the Orchestra’s tendency to play through the written riffs and to go off individually one by one, it’s not a surprise that the whole milieu feels competitive. This Hunter College show seems right in the middle of all this, the chemistry still operates at this point, but the shredding was getting almost ridiculous and undoubtedly part of that is because this show needs a bit of pitch correction. This is really the template for the whole shredding fusion genre and while this may never be topped for that sort of thing, I feel particularly on this show that they were barely paying attention to dynamics and the songs and just going for broke. It’s completely exhausting in every way and only topped in multinote hysteria when McLaughlin teamed up with Santana the year after.
Marc Ribot - Spiritual Unity
In many ways Ribot is the child of McLaughlin and like McLaughlin himself highly influenced by the jazz of John Coltrane. Coltrane’s musical cousin Albert Ayler is the inspiration for this outing, including Ayler’s own bass player Henry Grimes, and I’ll say straight out that except for an album or two a great deal of Ayler is lost on me; however, it didn’t in any way prevent me from enjoying this tribute to a great extent. Obviously this is not slavish imitation and Ribot’s excellent band is not only free but definitely a son of the New York avant/jazz scene, but for me, it’s just nice having a band performing the material as on many occasions Ayler’s saxophone improvisations used to leave his own band in the dust. My favorite piece was probably the 15 1/2 minute “Bells” which is so angular and bizarrely rendered that it was fascinating throughout. Who knows, maybe this will help me get a gateway into more than just Village Vanguard Ayler, in fact the absence of the saxophone might just bring the far left a little closer for those who avoid this stuff due to the honking.