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  1. Andy Edwards is a (very good) multi-instrumentalist and (completely brilliant) off-the-cuff raconteur. He’s a professional podcaster who slipped into it by accident when he was bored one day several years ago and made a ‘rank the Mahavishnu Orchestra albums’ video podcast for fun.

    A great deal of his extraordinary torrent of video ‘casts since then have been about John McLaughlin, the Mahavishnus and that world in one way or another. I’ve watched only a small number of the total – there just isn’t time… He’s also been extremely kind about my books – thank you Andy. 🙏

    But this latest one, I think, in among all the knockabout humour, is very powerful and quite emotional. Nine years after the release of the live album (commemorating the joint bands’ set (of Mahavishnu repertoire, for the first time in decades) of John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring’s co-headlining 2017 tour of the US (John’s farewell tour of that region), Andy finally reviews it.

    In doing so, he works through conflicted feelings and insightful commentary on what he’s hearing (as a hardcore Mahavishnu fan) and somehow works his way, maybe planned, maybe not, towards a conclusion that’s profound and, I think, very moving.

    In 2017, all five of the original MO – who together, Andy argues (and I agree), were beyond anything, unique, a spiritual experience at the edge of what is possible, a music of harshness and beauty at the same time – could have all gone onstage again. For the first time in 44 years. At the very least, there were hints that Jerry Goodman – the violinist whose sound and style is hugely underrated and overlooked today, the original MO Mk1 prodigy 1971-73 – was up for joining John. That alone would have been magical, a lovely gesture – as Andy rightly identifies, no matter how solidly proficient and all-the-notes-in-the-right-places the guest violinist on the 2017 album is.

    But that moment passed. And now the Mahavishnu Orchestra – with Rick Laird gone, John retired, Jan and Jerry dealing with health concerns and Billy still out there but no longer playing with the power – how could he? how could anyone? – and in the style of those MO years – is gone. Their book is now closed.

    Andy was near 50 when the 2017 album came out; he’s near 60 now. We all share that trajectory.

    So it’s as much about Andy homaging what the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s music has meant to him and his sense of mortality as just a few thoughts on a live album. It was the last flicker of the inner mounting flame.

    I share his pain, or perhaps stoicism. We all joke about it here, I know – the four-day solos and all that – but for me, it really was, and it remains, the pinnacle of all music. Created at a moment in time by exactly the right five people in the right place, at a time when music mattered more than it does now, at a time when there were still possibilities to be found, still mountains to be climbed, still visions of an emerald beyond. And hundreds of thousands were, for a moment, beguiled and swept along.

    And then it ended, only two and half years after it began. And there was no reunion. And, you know, even if there had been it wouldn’t have been the same – it would have been itself a homage to a moment, for all sorts of reasons. But it would have been a lovely moment of closure.

    Still, we lived through a time of magic and I’m grateful that so much of it survives on tape – so many glimpses of impossible, inspirational, transcendent music on stages in buildings that are perhaps themselves now gone.

    There is wisdom and nobility, I think, in paying tribute to those who have gone before us, who did things that were really worth something, that brought some good to the world. Andy references that near the end. I’m with him on that 100%.

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