John McLaughlin: ‘The purists are disappearing like the dodo’

John McLaughlin is reminiscing about his first encounter with Miles Davis, just two days after the English guitarist moved from London to New York in 1969. He had been recruited for Davis’s album In a Silent Way, an audacious exercise in what would become known as fusion — a hybridised jazz with rock and electronic elements that variously provoked scorn and adulation on its release in the summer of that year.

“Miles was like a Zen master,” McLaughlin recalls. “He had this gift with his musicians. He would in one sentence knock the ordinary out of a musician’s mind. Like on that particular recording, he said: ‘Play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar.’”

Did he mean, I suggest, unlearn what you think you know in order to access some deeper kind of knowledge?

“Exactly,” McLaughlin beams, like a genial Obi-Wan Kenobi. His thoughts return to the encounter with Davis. “I was so nervous. But I just let it all go and threw caution to the wind. And that’s all he wanted. I’ve seen him do it many times with other musicians. He would just say one thing and your whole mindset is different. I learnt so much from that.”

McLaughlin, now 79, is talking to me by video call from the summer house he shares with his wife Ina Behrend in Cap d’Ail, a French seaside resort along the Mediterranean coast from Monaco where they have their main home. Lauded in 1971 by rock critic Lester Bangs as cutting “a swath through the music of our time wider and more far-reaching than any guitarist since Eric Clapton”, he has mastered numerous different genres, including jazz, flamenco and Indian classical music. He is as expressive with an acoustic guitar as electric, a gifted composer and improviser, and former leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

He has a new album coming out, Liberation Time. The title refers to the past 17 months of lockdowns and restrictions. “I felt my wings were clipped,” McLaughlin says. “I really needed liberation. I was going bonkers, I needed to get that feeling of moving.”

I was going bonkers, I needed to get that feeling of moving

The album opens with an exuberant fanfare of jazz guitar, a curtain raiser for an alternately vigorous and reflective set of tracks. One is called “Lockdown Blues”, a dashing exercise in jazz-guitar shredding and rhythmic sprightliness. No similarity is intended to the anti-lockdown song that Eric Clapton made with Van Morrison last year.

“Oh really? Eric? He has a new album?” McLaughlin says when I mention the controversial single, “Stand and Deliver”. “I’m sure he’s playing great on it,” he says in a cheerfully ecumenical fashion on being told of the criticism Clapton received for his stance.

Liberation Time was made with a set of musicians based in places ranging from Cairo to Los Angeles, who recorded their parts separately. The music has a bustling, improvisational energy, as though McLaughlin and his collaborators were bouncing ideas off each other in the same space rather than operating remotely. The guitarist devised the structure of each track, but encouraged his players to go where inspiration took them.

“You can hear the chords I’m playing,” he says of his instructions to them. “Don’t play them my way, play them your way. I want to hear how you feel. Especially during the improvisations, just be yourself. Don’t play something you think I might like, I’m not interested. Even if it’s crazy, that’s what I want. So they had no constraints other than the structure of a piece.”

It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away

Two tracks feature him playing piano, which he has not done on a recording since his 1973 joint album with fellow guitar ace Carlos Santana, Love Devotion Surrender. It returns him to the first instrument he learnt to play. Born in 1942, he grew up in Whitley Bay, a coastal town in north-east England near Newcastle upon Tyne. His mother was an amateur violinist. McLaughlin dutifully tried to learn the same instrument but after scraping away — “a horrible sound” — he asked to move to piano. The guitar came to him as a cast-off from an older brother when he was 11. “I just fell in love with it. It’s still a love affair today, after all these years,” he says.

The youngest of five, he supplemented the classical music he learnt from his mother with Mississippi and Chicago blues records acquired by his siblings. “It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away. So the record player became my favourite teacher.”

He has been a professional musician since he was 16, when he was recruited to join a northern English trad jazz troupe, Big Pete Deuchar and His Professors of Ragtime. A move to London followed where he worked in Georgie Fame’s band as a session musician. He had a stint in Alexis Korner’s band, also a training ground for members of the Rolling Stones and bluesmen such as John Mayall and Clapton, before joining The Graham Bond Organisation with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, later of Cream.

“Those guys were more hardcore than Georgie Fame, the passion was definitely more intense,” he says. “It was like, let’s have some blood on stage.”

His style emerged from a distinctively British fertile crescent in the 1960s where the worlds of jazz, R&B, blues and light entertainment overlapped. McLaughlin can play with great speed and attack, in the flamboyant mode of the archetypal guitar hero, yet he also has a profoundly tuned ear for texture, the ability to immerse himself in a composition.

As well as In a Silent Way, he played for Miles Davis on 1970’s Bitches Brew and 1971’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson. His love of flamenco led to collaborations with Spanish maestro Paco de Lucía. He studied under Ravi Shankar in the 1970s, the foundation for a life-long involvement in Indian music.

In 1971 he founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra, whose jazz-rock fusion turned him into a chart star. “Mahavishnu” was the name McLaughlin had been given by the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy, who was McLaughlin’s guru in the 1970s.

“For the last 55 years I have been cultivating the spirit in myself, which I still do to this day, because without that I’m dead,” he says. “The cultivation of the spirit is actually the cultivation of wonder and awe. The gigantic mystery of being alive in an infinite universe.”

The artistic enemies of his philosophy of connectedness are the purists who insist on keeping different genres of music apart. “I have lived my entire life with these people, scathingly criticising the Mahavishnu Orchestra, for example. ‘This is not jazz!’ But I’m happy to say the purists are disappearing, like the dodo,” he says. “Music is the real force. And if it comes from the hearts of men and women, then it’s universal.”

‘Liberation Time’ is released by Abstract Logix/Mediastarz on July 16

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