John McLaughlin: The Shakti Sage (Part One of Two)

The following is an edited and expanded version of a feature that was originally published in The Tonearm.

Busy and vital as ever at age 83, John McLaughlin is currently overseeing two new album releases. Montreux Jazz Festival 2022 is a 2CD+Blu-Ray document of the virtuoso guitarist with his longtime band, the 4^th Dimension. On thrilling, fiery tracks like “Kiki,” the quintet – McLaughlin plus Étienne M’Bappé on bass, keyboardist/drummer extraordinaire Gary Husband, pianist Jany McPherson and drummer Nicolas Viccaro – wipes away any perceived lines between blues, jazz and fusion. The set features twelve tunes, ten of which are McLaughlin originals. Also featured is a transcendent reading of Pharoah Sanders’ sublime “The Creator Has a Master Plan.”

McLaughlin seems to have a master plan all his own as well. In the early ‘70s, and alongside two other major endeavors – a thriving solo career and leading the groundbreaking Mahavishnu Orchestra – he launched Shakti, one of the first-ever “world fusion” groups. Seamlessly combining Eastern and Western musical sensibilities, the ensemble featured McLaughlin alongside some of India’s most revered traditional musicians. Their sonic synthesis yielded several acclaimed tours and three albums released during that decade.

Inevitably – owing to the busy schedules of the involved parties – Shakti was an intermittent project. After a lengthy hiatus, McLaughlin and Shakti mainstay Zakir Hussain reactivated the group in 2023, earning a Grammy Award for This Moment. Hussain died in December 2024; shortly thereafter McLaughlin announced that Shakti was done. But Mind Explosion, a recording drawn from the group’s triumphant 50^th anniversary tour, serves as an exclamation point at the end of the Shakti saga. It’s also meant as a tribute to Hussain, Zakir McLaughlin’s longtime partner in that musical endeavor.

Though he’s a willing, lively and engaging interviewee, John McLaughlin has taken part in comparatively few interviews focusing on Shakti. So the opportunity to speak with him about that group was a treat indeed.

What was your first exposure to Indian music?

Oh, my; we’re going to go back to the ‘60s!? Probably it was one of the Beatles tunes where George Harrison was playing sitar. But then around 1967, I heard a South Indian veena player called S. Balachander; he just blew my mind. And this also coincided with the psychedelic period; we were all tripping… legally, of course. And it coincided with my desire to discover something about the meaning of life, as they say.

But from that point, hearing Balachander and the South Indian school which he was part of, was more than fascinating. It just grew. I moved to the U.S. at the beginning of ‘69, and by the time I got to New York, I had already started to look for a teacher to teach me Indian theory. Either North or South; I didn’t care. And it was that summer where I got to meet Zakir Hussain for the first time. And the rest is history, really.

What was the inspiration to launch Shakti?

Because they were amazing players. The Indian musical system, whether North or South, is linear; they don’t have harmony, but they have amongst their musicians some of the most unbelievable improvisers. And that’s the key word, because other than jazz, they’re the only other school that improvises rhythmically.

And that coincided with a very curious phenomenon in 1958 when Miles [Davis] came out with the new modal system of playing. When I heard that for the first time was on Milestones; that came out in ‘58. I would have been 16, and I knew that this school was for me. The great thing about the modal school is that it’s also linear. Coltrane made his own version of that with Impressions. He took the structure right out of Miles’ book.

We in the west, we use harmony. But what changed for me was that I saw everything – even harmony – in linear terms, and that was a big change for me. Instead of seeing it vertically like a chord, I just saw a chord like the same notes of a scale, or whatever mode played simultaneously. So that loosened everything up for me.

But the thing is, the Indian players are not only master improvisers, they’re master improvisers in very odd time signatures, which has been my personal fetish since I was very young. And this continues to this day; I can’t help it. Especially if I’m using a harmonic structure, [I enjoy] the challenge of playing in, say, 5 or 15 or 11 or whatever, with not just a rhythm – that rhythmical restraint – but the harmonic restraints.

It goes back to this quote of Stravinsky I read. He said [paraphrased], “The more restraints I put on myself, the freer I become.” I think this is where discipline comes in. Because in the end, I’m a firm believer that perfect discipline will lead to perfect freedom; that’s the way I see it.

You talk about the linear nature, the commonality between the two forms, jazz and Indian music. When you put Shakti together, did you find that you had to make any concessions to either approach to make them work together?

No; it fell right into place. Because at that time – and it’s continued to this day in the evolution of Indian music – Indian musicians were as fascinated about Western music as I was about their music. Especially people like Zakir Hussain or L. Shankar, the violinist whom I met at Wesleyan University where I was studying veena with Dr. Ramanathan.

Part of my goal as a Western musician was to be able to move to a certain degree harmonically. I was playing notes that were not in that specific raga they were playing, but they were the right notes whereby I could enhance a solo by bringing in another kind of color behind their solo. The Indian musicians really liked that, where I would [add] another color. Even though they were playing the same raga, it sounded differently because of the fundamental.

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