# John McLaughlin: The great guitarist on arthritis, choosing art over money and working with Miles Davis: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/05/17/john-mclaughlin-the-great-guitarist-on-arthritis-choosing-art-over-money-and-working-with-miles-davis-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-05-17T05:12:24+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Identity is a fluid concept for guitarist John McLaughlin. He was born in Yorkshire;
forged as a guitarist in Swinging Sixties London; summoned to New York to play with
the cream of American jazz; became leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, deeply connected
to [India](https://www.irishtimes.com/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=India)
and its music; then a globe-trotting jazz superstar; and for the last four decades
has based himself in [Monaco](https://www.irishtimes.com/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=Monaco).
So just who does John McLaughlin think he is?**

“My entire musical career is based on black American music,” he says via Zoom from
his Riviera home. “Whether its rhythm and blues, funk or jazz, whether its straight-
ahead jazz, Coltrane or the greats, this is my music, this is my school. But my 
answer would be: I feel European if I feel anything at all.”

In fact, he’s very proud of his Irish name and first visited the land of his ancestors
in the early 1960s, when, as a young guitarist with Herbie Goins and the Night-Timers,
he was part of the glamorous international jet set that flew into Dublin in 1962
for the 21st-birthday party of Guinness heir [Tara Browne](https://www.irishtimes.com/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Tara+Browne)
at Luggala in the Wicklow mountains.

“That was my first time going to Ireland, and I have to tell you that I had a feeling
of coming home. Isn’t that strange?” McLaughlin is an easy interviewee: gracious,
talkative, enthusiastic and wearing his 80 years lightly. “I hadn’t really thought
much about Ireland growing up, but actually to arrive in Ireland and see it, it 
affected me very deeply.”“I did a very bad thing. I just hit the gas and left everybody
in the shit. It’s bad”

![Miles Davis - John McLaughlin (1969) - YouTube](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/
vi/15kbTy9vm3k/maxresdefault.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

The Night-Timers was just one of several prominent R&B bands that McLaughlin played
with during the mid-1960s. This was a time when the London scene was enjoying its
blues explosion, and McLaughlin, already a fluent, technically gifted guitarist,
played with some of the most influential bands of the time, including the Graham
Bond Organisation with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker; and Georgie Fame and the Blue
Flames. He even gave a few guitar lessons to a pre-Led Zeppelin [Jimmy Page](https://www.irishtimes.com/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Jimmy+Page).
But as the 1960s progressed, he found himself increasingly cast as a gun for hire,
and while he enjoyed the financial independence, it nearly destroyed him as a musician.

“The thing is, most of it was rubbish,” he says of the endless round of commercial
recordings he did in the late 1960s. “And I saw what it was doing to musicians. 
They had this look in their eyes that really disturbed me, and if I was going to
continue that way, I was going to die.”

One day McLaughlin pulled his car up outside yet another London studio and sat there
for a few minutes contemplating his destiny. And then, he says, “I did a very bad
thing. I just hit the gas and left everybody in the shit. It’s bad.” Even 50 years
later, he still feels a little guilty about it. “So I became more poor again.”

#### First jazz album

He moved to Holland for a while, recorded his first jazz album, Extrapolation, and
was beginning to find his feet as a jazz musician when he got a phone call that 
would change everything. It was from legendary Miles Davis drummer [Tony Williams](https://www.irishtimes.com/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Tony+Williams),
an invitation to join a new trio he was forming with organist Larry Young. At the
time, Williams was still a member of the Davis group, and when McLaughlin arrived
in New York on a freezing night in early January 1969, the drummer was fulfilling
his last engagement with the great trumpeter.

“They were playing at this club in Harlem called Club Baron, and I was standing 
at the bar the first night. The door opens and Miles walks in, and he had on this
big black cape, and he was so handsome and just – what an aura he had. And he saw
me and, as he walked past me, he brushed me with his cape, and he said ‘Johhhhhn’”–
McLaughlin gamely imitates Davis’s husky drawl – “and he walked on. That blew my
mind because he knew my name.”

The next day Williams brought his new guitarist to visit Davis at his apartment 
in Manhattan. “And Miles said to me, ‘We have a date tomorrow, bring your guitar’.
And that was it.”

![Miles Davis and John McLaughlin | Miles davis, Mclaughlin, Music pics](https://
i0.wp.com/i.pinimg.com/originals/72/2c/e3/722ce3e39256d15e29fb91fa33b277a2.jpg?w
=640&ssl=1)

Although he wasn’t to know it at the time, McLaughlin had just been invited to take
part in what would become one of the most famous recording sessions in jazz history,
which would sharply divide opinion in the jazz world and usher in the era of jazz
fusion. Nor was he to know that Davis, in the way that he had of pushing his musicians
out of their comfort zones, was about to anoint this unknown 27-year-old English
guitarist as one of that art form’s patron saints.

McLaughlin has honed his Miles impersonation over the years, and clearly enjoys 
conjuring the economy and menace with which the trumpeter expressed himself

McLaughlin has told it many times, the famous story of what Davis said to him in
the studio, but he tells it with good humour and generosity, like it was yesterday.
The next day he found himself in the famous CBS studio on 30th Street (where Davis’s
epochal Kind of Blue was also recorded) with some of the most important musicians
in American jazz. The band began working on In a Silent Way, the tune by keyboardist
Joe Zawinul that would give the album its name.

“We ran the tune a couple of times and Miles was not happy. So he stopped everything,
and he looks at me and he says to me, ‘You play it’, and I said, ‘You want the melody,
the chords, what?’ and he looks at me and he says ‘Everything!’ ” McLaughlin has
honed his Miles impersonation over the years, and clearly enjoys conjuring the economy
and menace with which the trumpeter expressed himself.

“So I am sweating big time, and I don’t really know what to do, so after maybe 30
seconds, which felt like an hour to me, he comes out with ‘Play it like you don’t
know how to play the guitar.’ ”

#### Greatest alive

It’s ironic that the phrase that has followed McLaughlin around ever since should
be a reference to not knowing how to play the guitar. There are few in the world
who know better how to play that instrument. Certainly other guitarists, including
Pat Metheny and Jeff Beck, rate McLaughlin as probably the greatest alive. But even
today, the mysterious opening melody of In a Silent Way stands as one of the guitarist’s
most personal, most affecting performances.

“That was the thing about Miles, because when he had his musicians get like that,
they would play from a place they don’t know, instead of playing what they know 
or what they think Miles wants, or what they want to show Miles.”

Dismay broke out among McLaughlin fans in 2017 when it was announced that the great
guitarist was suffering from arthritis and would not be performing live any more

Over the next couple of years, McLaughlin would become a regular with Davis, recording
ground-breaking albums such as Bitches Brew and On the Corner. But it was also a
time when he began leading his own groups, notably the trail-blazing Mahavishnu 
Orchestra (which included Irish-born bassist Rick Laird) a band that signalled McLaughlin’s
growing interest in Indian music. He would go on to become perhaps the first western
musician to fully integrate the complex rhythms and melodic improvisations of the
Indian classical traditions into his own playing, which reached its virtuosic zenith
in his Indian supergroup Shakti. In the early 1980s, McLaughlin broke through to
a wider audience in an acclaimed trio with fellow jazz guitarist Al Di Meola and
Flamenco master Paco de Lucía. They were known simply as the Guitar Trio, and their
1981 recording Friday Night in San Francisco is ground zero for fans of the acoustic
guitar.

![John McLaughlin On Miles Davis In JazzTimes - Miles Davis](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.
smehost.net/milesdaviscom-uslegacyprod/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/160812_johnmclaughlin.
jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

Since 2007 McLaughlin’s main performance vehicle has been the powerful group The
4th Dimension, which he is bringing to Dublin, but there have also been revivals
of Shakti and the Mahavishnu Orchestra that have reminded listeners of just how 
much incredible music has flowed from his hands over the past six decades. But dismay
broke out among McLaughlin fans in 2017 when it was announced that the great guitarist
was suffering from arthritis and would not be performing live any more.

#### Miraculous recovery

He credits his miraculous recovery to learning about American doctor Joe Dispenza,
who healed his own broken back through meditation and what McLaughlin calls “intent”.“
I’m still into my yoga and my meditation, because that’s an integral part of my 
life, and before my meditation, I sit down and go into my hands and I talk to them,
and I tell them how beautiful they are, how much I love them, and how marvellous
and miraculous they are. Now, since the last three years, I have no pain at all.
I’ve never felt better musically. We are capable of amazing things, but we underestimate
ourselves.”

What a fantastic life I’ve had. How fortunate I am, to have played with the best
in the West, the best in East

His recovery, alas, coincided with the Covid pandemic, and for the past two years
McLaughlin has been waiting, it seems quite impatiently, to get back on the road.
Earlier this year he celebrated his 80th birthday, but as he looks forward to a 
European tour that brings him to Dublin on May 26th, he sounds more like the wide-
eyed twentysomething guitarist that Miles Davis knew.

“When I look back on my life as musician, I can only say ‘Hey, thank you God!’, 
not just God, ‘Thank you people, thank you music!’, because what a fantastic life
I’ve had. How fortunate I am, to have played with the best in the West, the best
in East. I mean, Jesus, come on!” he says, laughing. “I can’t ask for more than 
that. And I’m still here. I just need a gig, man.”

![John McLaughlin on stage during a concert in April 2019 in Berlin, Germany. Photograph:
Frank Hoensch/Redferns](https://i0.wp.com/www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.4857317.1650449202%
21/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_620_330/image.jpg?resize=640%2C340&ssl=1)

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