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| Mahavishnu Orchestra "Apocalypse": Track-By-Track
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From the gently dissonant piano chords opening the leadoff cut, "Power Of Love", you know you're entering a different world, as Jean-Luc Ponty's wah-wah fiddle skates over the orchestra's gradual, primal stretching and awakening, you begin to sense that McLaughlin is, as ever, serious. Certainly the experiment--couching a smaller improvising unit within a larger, scripted, classically oriented context--hearkens back to Third-Stream ideas.
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"Vision Is A Naked Sword" opens with a bluesy guitar figure that gradually speeds up and explodes into a hurtling Trane-ish solo over a Milesian modal backing; rock licks flicker and flame around the edges.
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"Smiles Of The Beyond" starts as a kind of art-song, then shifts gears into rock with throaty guitar overdrive, hard-scrabbling fiddle, burbling bass runs, and fierce beats punctuated by slower orchestral washes.
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The nasally oriental oboe snaking through the beginning of "Wings Of Karma" leads into a section that proves that John McLaughlin (aided by orchestrator Michael Gibbs) has some very clear ideas about how he wants to use that mammoth instrument called the symphony orchestra. No mere drones or soaring-string backdrops, the symphonic sections work as music in their own right, and are integrated as well or better with the electric band than most other efforts along these potentially slippery lines. McLaughlin's guitar aches and moans and spits Hendrixy fire while his loose-limbed band and the orchestra's shifting textures create kaleidoscopes.
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What could be less predictably formatted than the loping, mid-tempo, funk kickoff, "Hymn To Him"?
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Vol. 17, No. 2: Feb.-Mar. 2012
