A "meeting of the spirits"

Finally, I've set aside some time to watch a video from 1979 that a guitar-playing friend loaned to me a couple of weeks ago after we'd been chatting and sharing videos about favorite guitar players, just in time for me to return it to him later today.

The video was recorded in 1979, featuring some legendary members of "The Guitar Trio" (not to be confused with my friends from the California Guitar Trio, featuring Utah's own Paul Richards whose flying fingers have been featured in this blog's main photo above since Day One of this blog).  This guitar trio was formed by jazz fusion pioneer Larry Coryell, also featuring another jazz fusion pioneer in John McLaughlin as well as Spanish flamenco guitar legend Paco De Lucia.

Larry Coryell (left), John McLaughlin (middle), and Paco De Lucia

The video is titled "Meeting of the Spirits."  It's a remarkable blending not only of guitar giants, but of guitar styles.  It's heavy on that marvelous Spanish style that De Lucia has helped to revolutionize, but the highlight for me is the extended interplay between the three men on the title song -- taking McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra classic "Meeting of the Spirits" and giving it a whole new feel, minus the keyboards, drums, bass and violin that helped make the song so memorable.

It's also memorable when three players at the top of their game rip into it, either with flying picks from Coryell and McLaughlin to De Lucia's amazing finger picking style.  The fretboard work is jaw-dropping as well.

I'd long been a fan of the trio that came after this one, featuring McLaughlin and De Lucia playing with Al Di Meola.  This was my first exposure to the trio in this formation.

It's well worth sharing with my own friends here.

Tune up that air guitar: Jazz fusion style

Fusion is just what it says it is: fusing a bit of jazz music together with a bit of rock.  There's a lot of blending going on in the genre, with a lot of Latin sounds thrown in as well.

There's also a lot of shredding going on, especially when it comes to guitar playing.

It's an air guitarist's dream.

Many's been the time I've listened to Allan Holdsworth do his share of shredding and "pulled out" my air guitar to shred along with him.  I know actual musicians who've done the same, with air guitar.  It helps to know that Holdsworth is one of Eddie Van Halen's guitar heroes as well.

John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, Steve Morse with the Dixie Dregs or on his own, Tony Macalpine, Bill Connors ... yeah, they all make me want to do some shredding of my own.

In the air.

Who's afraid of the "Inner Mounting Flame?"

It's Halloween.  It's a time to scare someone, and to get scared.  Some people might play some eerily spooky music for a night like tonight.  As for me, I'll play some jazz fusion that's "frighteningly good."

For that, I'll turn to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the band's debut album, "The Inner Mounting Flame."  MO set the bar pretty high in the fusion world, led by fiery guitarist Mahavishnu John McLaughlin.  But it went beyond him.  He had a uniquely trailblazing group of players behind him.  On violin, Jerry Goodman could match him note for note.  Jan Hammer had a sound all his own on keyboards.  Rick Laird was solid on bass, and Billy Cobham provided some of the most muscular drumming around.

It was the kind of jazz that reached across easily to rock fans and touched them in a special way.  That was the magic of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

My "late-blossoming" appreciation for jazz fusion

I can say that my love of jazz fusion came later than my love of progressive rock, simply because I was introduced to the "more extreme" fusion later.

Oh, I'd thought I knew what fusion was about in my high school days when I started going ga-ga over girls, and I found myself going for the more romantic, smooth jazz sounds of musicians like Chuck Mangione and George Benson.  I thought that kind of music would help me to get and hold on to a girl.

Then came my early college days, and I got a whole different kind of introduction to how intense jazz fusion can really be -- with its screaming rock-style guitar, rhythms more often associated with Latin sounds, keyboards riffing like crazy, and drummers pounding the snot out of those heads.

It meant discovering the guitar mastery of players like John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, Steve Morse, and Allan Holdsworth; bass giants along the lines of Percy Jones, Stanley Clarke, and Jaco Pastorius; violin players as gifted as Jerry Goodman and Jean-Luc Ponty; keyboard wizards like Jan Hammer, Chick Corea, and T Lavitz; drummers like Phil Collins in his Brand X days and Billy Cobham with his powerful shoulders; and groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Dixie Dregs, Weather Report, Return To Forever, and Brand X.

This was the "bad (as in very good) stuff."