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Stairway to Heaven

Led Zeppelin · 1971 · solo by Jimmy Page
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Guitar hero

John McLaughlin

The fusion firebrand who fused rock volume, jazz harmony and Indian rhythm

John McLaughlin was born in Doncaster in 1942 to a concert violinist mother and grew up with classical music at home. He studied violin and piano before an older brother gave him a guitar at eleven. Blues records, and then Django Reinhardt, drew him in, and by the early 1960s he was working the London scene. In 1963 he joined the Graham Bond Quartet with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, and he also did session work and gave lessons, including to a young Jimmy Page.

His 1969 debut, Extrapolation, showed a harmonically advanced, very fast player, and that year he moved to New York to join drummer Tony Williams's Lifetime, whose Emergency! helped launch jazz-rock. Miles Davis quickly recruited him for In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson, and even named a Bitches Brew track after him. Around this time he adopted the spiritual name Mahavishnu under the guru Sri Chinmoy, a path he later moved away from.

In 1971 he formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra with Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman and Rick Laird. Loud and complex, with odd time signatures and a double-neck Gibson, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, a US gold record, set the standard for jazz-rock fusion. When that line-up broke apart at the end of 1973, he turned to acoustic music, founding Shakti with Zakir Hussain and L. Shankar to combine jazz with Indian classical music.

Around 1980 he toured and recorded with Paco de Lucía and Al Di Meola as the Guitar Trio, and Friday Night in San Francisco became one of the best-selling acoustic guitar albums ever. Later decades brought new Mahavishnu line-ups, Remember Shakti, and his electric 4th Dimension band, along with Grammy wins as late as 2018. Settled in Monaco, he revived Shakti in the 2020s, and its album This Moment won the 2024 Grammy for Best Global Music Album.

The 10 greatest John McLaughlin solos

  1. 1
    Meeting of the Spirits
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1971
  2. 2
    Dance of Maya
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1971
  3. 3
    Birds of Fire
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1973
  4. 4
    One Word
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1973
  5. 5
    Vital Transformation
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1971
  6. 6
    Right Off
    Miles Davis · solo by John McLaughlin · 1971
  7. 7
    Emergency!
    The Tony Williams Lifetime · solo by John McLaughlin · 1969
  8. 8
    Extrapolation
    John McLaughlin · solo by John McLaughlin · 1969
  9. 9
    Short Tales of the Black Forest
    Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin & Paco de Lucía · solo by John McLaughlin · 1981
  10. 10
    Miles Beyond
    Mahavishnu Orchestra · solo by John McLaughlin · 1973

The sound

McLaughlin plays with a fierce, percussive attack, using strict alternate picking for bursts of very fast, evenly articulated notes that seem to hit like a drummer. His lines draw on bebop and Coltrane-style modal playing, spiced with Indian ragas, and he thinks in rhythmic cycles, often counting in Carnatic konnakol syllables. In the early Mahavishnu days his Gibson double-neck through a cranked Marshall gave a searing, violin-like sustain. On acoustic guitar, especially the scalloped-fret Shakti guitar, he bends pitches like a sitar or veena player. Intensity and spiritual purpose run through everything he plays.

  • Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck (guitar) His main guitar in the classic 1971–73 Mahavishnu Orchestra, switching between 12-string and 6-string necks.
  • Marshall 100-watt head (amp) Pushed to extreme volume, it produced the singing, sustained Mahavishnu tone.
  • Abraham Wechter Shakti guitar (guitar) A modified Gibson J-200-style acoustic with a scalloped fingerboard and sympathetic drone strings, built for Shakti.
  • Gibson Byrdland (scalloped) (guitar) A scalloped-fret archtop that allowed the Indian-style pitch bends he used in the 1970s.
  • Gibson ES-345 (scalloped) (guitar) Another scalloped Gibson semi-hollow from his post-Mahavishnu period.
  • Godin electric and MIDI guitars (guitar) Used in his later electric bands, including for synthesizer voices.
  • PRS guitars (guitar) An endorsement that provided his electric guitars for much of his later career.

Covers

  • A Love Supreme, originally by John Coltrane He and Santana turn Coltrane's chant into a two-guitar prayer at rock volume.
  • Naima, originally by John Coltrane A gentle acoustic reading of Coltrane's ballad, a moment of calm on a fiery record.
  • Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, originally by Charles Mingus A solo acoustic version of Mingus's elegy, delicate and harmonically rich.
  • Vashkar, originally by Carla Bley Bley's angular theme becomes a snarling organ-trio jam.
  • Frevo Rasgado, originally by Egberto Gismonti A Brazilian dance tune played as a lively duet with Paco de Lucía.
  • Short Tales of the Black Forest, originally by Chick Corea He and Di Meola bring a lot of humour to Corea's piece, including jokey quotes.

Timeline

  • 1942 Born January 4 in Doncaster, England
  • 1963 Joins the Graham Bond Quartet
  • 1969 Releases Extrapolation, moves to New York, joins Tony Williams's Lifetime and records with Miles Davis
  • 1971 Forms the Mahavishnu Orchestra; The Inner Mounting Flame released
  • 1973 Birds of Fire reaches the US top 20 and goes gold; the original band splits at year's end
  • 1975 Shakti, with Zakir Hussain, L. Shankar and Vikku Vinayakram, records its live debut
  • 1979 Trio of Doom in Havana; starts touring in the Guitar Trio
  • 1981 Friday Night in San Francisco released
  • 2002 Remember Shakti's Saturday Night in Bombay wins a Grammy
  • 2024 Shakti's This Moment wins the Grammy for Best Global Music Album

Facts

  1. His mother was a concert violinist.
  2. He got his first guitar at 11 from his older brother.
  3. In the 1960s he gave guitar lessons to Jimmy Page.
  4. He recorded a jam session with Jimi Hendrix on March 25, 1969.
  5. Miles Davis named a track on Bitches Brew after him.
  6. The name Mahavishnu came from the guru Sri Chinmoy. McLaughlin later rejected those teachings.
  7. The distortion on Lifetime's Emergency! came partly from an engineer's careless recording, which gave the album its raw edge.
  8. His Shakti acoustic guitar had a scalloped fingerboard and extra drone strings that ran across the soundhole.
  9. He has lived in Monaco since the late 1980s.
  10. At 76 he won the 2018 Grammy for Best Improvised Jazz Solo, for Miles Beyond.

Sources