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You are here: Home / Forum / Astounding! The final Mk 1 Mahavishnu Orchestra concert (30/12/73) turns up

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  1. Amazingly, a fabulous and previously unknown recording of the last concert by the original Mahavisnu Orchestra (1971-73) turned up a few days ago. The accompanying text to the clip describes the painstaking digitisation process.

    The five-piece band had been doomed since a trip to Japan in September 1973 when personality issues became irreparable… but they still had concert bookings to fulfil. Two shows at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on December 27 and 28 – the city in which they came together – would have been the sensible way to bow out. And amazing recordings of those two shows have long circulated. But then there was a sports arena in Toledo, Ohio the next night and a Masonic Temple in Detroit, MI on 30 December.

    As Billy Cobham said a couple of months later in a ‘Melody Maker’ interview: ‘The last gig we did was in Detroit, and it was so anti-climactic. To me it never really made sense. We played two shows after New York, which is where it all started. And I could never understand… why? We should have finished on a high in New York. Why trudge through the snow to Detroit on New Years Eve. Come on, who needs it?’

    Well, to judge from the performance… we do! 😃

    John McLaughlin’s introductions have a downbeat air but other than that, this is astounding music – two hours 24 minutes of it, seven tunes. Not a perfunctory performance at all.

  7. Someone has just posted a digitisation from an original audience recorded tape of the MO at Orange, France in August 1975 – downloadable in FLAC for a couple of days only:

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