Tag Archives: johnmclaughlin
New John McLaughlin book: your feedback
Soundsofsurprise.com wants YOU! My new book on master musician John McLaughlin will be published worldwide by Rowman & Littlefield in September. The design department have put together a few draft covers, and I’d like to know which one YOU most like the look of. It would be good to get your feedback, and you’ll get […]
Album Review: Is That So? by John McLaughlin/Shankar Mahadevan/Zakir Hussain
It’s taken this writer two months and countless listening sessions to put pen to paper on the subject of Is That So?. But, as the cliché goes, it’s a lot easier to write about something you hate than something you love. Six years in the making, this spellbinding album may just be the most cohesive musical […]
John McLaughlin & The 4th Dimension @ Barbican, 23rd April 2019
If this was John’s final London gig, what a way to go out. Though the audience’s response was at times reverential and/or strangely undemonstrative, the outpouring of emotion at the conclusion was heartfelt and seemed to come as quite a shock to the performers too. It’s hard to think of another ‘jazz’ band which has […]
Album Review: John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring Live In San Francisco
If this is indeed McLaughlin’s final album, as some recent interviews have intimated, it’s a pretty remarkable one to go out on. There are various reasons for this; it’s the first bona fide full-scale return to Mahavishnu Orchestra material since the final incarnation of that band waved goodbye in 1975; it was recorded live on […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Terje Rypdal’s Waves
Terje Rypdal has enjoyed a very long and varied career with ECM Records. His guitar style is an in-your-face mixture of Hank Marvin-influenced wang-bar melodicism and jagged, dramatic lines that would seem more likely to come from a cello or violin. And whilst probably too much of a mysterious presence to be described as a […]
Larry Coryell 1943-2017
On 8th November 2016, the day after America voted to make Donald Trump the next president of the US, guitar legend Larry Coryell – who has died of heart failure – told Downbeat magazine’s Bill Milkowski: ‘Now that Trump is in, we’re going to make good on our promise to move to either Germany or […]
Allan Holdsworth @ 70: Five Of The Best
There’s an alternative, fantasy version of the BRITS Lifetime Achievement award where the likes of Allan Holdsworth get the recognition they deserve from their native music industry. There would also be gongs for Courtney Pine, Gary Crosby, John McLaughlin, Django Bates, Julian Joseph, Gary Husband, Bill Bruford and a few others. Of course that’ll never happen, […]
Dennis Chambers: Five Of The Best
The November 2015 issue of JazzTimes magazine featured a long-overdue interview with master-drummer Dennis Chambers. I’ll never forget first hearing his playing on the title track of John Scofield’s brilliant Blue Matter album as a highly-impressionable 15-year-old. I had never heard anyone play a kick drum like that. His grooves were tasty, funky and solid, […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Johnny McLaughlin Electric Guitarist
The 1970s were made for such an eclectic and open-eared musician as guitarist John McLaughlin. As blues, rock, free jazz, Eastern scales and psychedelia merged at the end of the previous decade, McLaughlin was perfectly placed to cash in with his distinctive brand of fusion and the world was ready to listen. Cutting his […]
John McLaughlin @ Barbican, 23rd April 2010
What is the role of the electric guitar in jazz music? Since Charlie Christian‘s revolutionary bebop permutations in the ’30s and ’40s, the guitar has undeniably held a fascination for jazz fans specifically and music fans in general. And when volume levels were increasing and minds expanding in the mid-to-late 1960s, in some ways John McLaughlin […]
Sounds Of Surprise 