Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin

I recently finished reading Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin, by Paul Stump. Half-way through I was confirmed in what I have been afraid of saying out loud for many, many years. Before I do, I accept and agree totally that John McLaughlin is the most virtuoso plectrum guitar player who will ever live. I heard him play on Bitches Brew and thought "no-one can play that fast", and when I saw the McLaughlin-de Lucia-diAmiola Trio play on TV, I knew no-one could play that fast. I actually saw the Tony Williams Lifetime play, at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. It was loud, it was fast, it was utterly, utterly, totally and completely unmusical.

The anti-McLaughlin is Neil Young, who is famous for, amongst other things, playing solos that consist of one note. But it's the right note, and it's played the right way, each time. That's musicality. Here's the Mahavishnu Orchestra on Meeting of The Spirits...



...and here's Hendrix on Pali Gap doing everything that McLaughlin does, but, well...



One is musical and the other isn't.

McLaughlin has his musical moments, many with Miles Davis. His playing on In A Silent Way is light, skipping and musical: technique in the service of music. His chordal playing on Jack Johnson is perfect: meaning that it's what it needs to be to make the music sound good. Mostly he lets his awesome technique run away with him. Speed, modes, odd scales, weird time-signatures: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The Art of The Fugue is in common time and D Minor, and proceeds at a measured pace.

If it was just him, it wouldn't be so bad. But many people seem to have decided that since that was the way Miles' guitarist played, they should play like that - unless they were going to be hard-boppers or Derek Bailey / Sonny Sharrock clones. So a large number of jazz guitarists play fast, noisy, often with some fuzz, almost always with an attempt to play with a rock influence, building to a string-bending climax as fake as a bored wife's orgasm. It doesn't work. Ritzy Bryan makes a splendid chaotic noise against a rock beat because she keeps it simple. Mary Halverson, John Scofield and others run all over the fretboard and just make a racket. I know they are trying to avoid jazz-lite (Pat Metheny on a bad day), or of course, sounding like Barney Kessel or Charlie Christian, but there are more ways of doing that than turning up the amplifier or doing the guitar equivalent of honking on the tenor sax.

The challenge for any artist is to work the media (instrument, musical genre) to express what you need to say, in your voice, so that other people feel what you're feeling. The goal is to play three notes and have everyone bet their house on who it is. Though each make and model of guitar has its own sound, Joni Mitchell will sound like herself no matter what axe she plays, and so will Eric Clapton: given, say, a Les Paul, each of them will work with it to get the "Les Paul" sound they can work with. It's a little bit more complicated than "tone is in the fingers", but that old saw expresses a truth.

And it is about feeling. Music is always about feeling. Except when you play so damn fast on an instrument that doesn't respond well to speed that you can't feel anything. That was what I always thought was wrong with McLaughlin's playing. Once upon a time I wanted to play that fast. That's not the deal I would make at the crossroads now: now, I would just want to play more like me.