John McLaughlin(1942–)

John McLaughlin was born at 47 Whitley Street, Doncaster on 4 January 1942, fourth child of Owen McLaughlin, an Irish-immigrant Yorkshire-based small concert-violinist of substantial classical-music training, and Beatrice McLaughlin, a Yorkshire-Catholic piano teacher. The household was small lower-middle-class Yorkshire-Irish of the wartime period: the father had emigrated from the County Tyrone Ulster Catholic-minority countryside in the early 1930s on the post-Depression Northern-Irish-Catholic emigration to the industrial English north, had married a Doncaster Catholic piano-teacher and had settled into the Doncaster grammar-school music-teaching circuit of the inter-war period. The boys were trained on the classical piano-and-violin instruments from the early ages of four and five; John took up the classical-piano from four and the acoustic guitar from eleven on his mother's small Spanish-classical-guitar lending.

He left the Doncaster Grammar School at sixteen in 1958, moved to London at seventeen in 1959, and worked across the 1959 to 1969 period in the London-jazz-club-circuit of the post-trad-jazz small modern-jazz period of the late-1950s-and-1960s small British modern-jazz revival. He played small unpaid sets at the Ronnie Scott's-and-Marquee-and-Flamingo small Soho jazz-clubs through the early 1960s, joined small touring rhythm-and-blues bands across the mid-1960s period (Graham Bond Organisation, Brian Auger Trinity), and across the 1965 to 1968 period was the session-guitarist of the London-modern-jazz session-music scene that the post-1965 London Pop-and-Rock recording industry was running. He recorded his first solo album *Extrapolation* (Marmalade Records, 1969) at the CBS Studios in central London in January 1969 with the saxophonist John Surman, the bassist Brian Odgers and the drummer Tony Oxley.

The small Miles Davis connection came at the February 1969 small US-jazz-trumpet leader's small London residency at the Ronnie Scott's club; the Davis quintet had been working through the post-1968 jazz-rock-fusion experimental small transition period of the *Filles de Kilimanjaro* (1968) sessions and was small looking for the electric-guitar-fusion player that the subsequent *In a Silent Way* and *Bitches Brew* sessions would require. Davis hired McLaughlin at twenty-seven on a one-album-session contract for *In a Silent Way*, which the Davis-Tony-Williams-Wayne-Shorter-Joe-Zawinul-Herbie-Hancock-McLaughlin small February 1969 small Columbia Studios B small recording session produced across two small full days of recording, was released on Columbia in late July 1969, and is on the consensus of the modern jazz-and-popular-music criticism the foundational jazz-rock-fusion album of the post-bop modern-jazz tradition.

He followed *In a Silent Way* with the *Bitches Brew* small August 1969 small Columbia Studios sessions (the *Bitches Brew* double-album released on Columbia in March 1970 ran the Davis-McLaughlin-Joe-Zawinul-Wayne-Shorter-Chick-Corea-Lenny-White ensemble across the four-side small free-form jazz-fusion small composition-and-improvisation pattern that has been the foundational text of the subsequent forty-five-year jazz-rock-fusion tradition). He continued with Davis on *A Tribute to Jack Johnson* (1971), *Live-Evil* (1971) and *On the Corner* (1972) across the 1970-72 jazz-fusion-period; the Davis-McLaughlin small five-album partnership across the 1969 to 1972 period was the small electric-guitar contribution to the Davis post-*Bitches Brew* small jazz-fusion-canon.

He founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the New York City small November 1971 small session as a full-time jazz-fusion-quintet under his own leadership; the Mahavishnu small first-formation (McLaughlin on small electric-guitar, the Czech-violinist Jerry Goodman, the Czech-keyboardist Jan Hammer, the Irish-bassist Rick Laird, the Latin-American-drummer Billy Cobham) released the *Inner Mounting Flame* (Columbia, 1971) and *Birds of Fire* (Columbia, 1973) across the two-year small first-formation period that the fusion-historiography treats as the small fusion-ensemble formation of the 1970s decade. He moved into the Indian-jazz-fusion small Shakti-formation partnership with the Indian-tabla-master Zakir Hussain and the Indian-violinist L. Shankar across the 1973-77 period (the Shakti small four-album cycle from 1976 to 1978), and across the 1980s and 1990s ran the electric-guitar-trio-and-quartet small One Truth Band, the Free Spirits and the Mahavishnu Project small fusion-revival small ensembles. He was made small OBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours, has lived in Monte Carlo, Monaco continuously since the early 1980s on the French-Italian Riviera small tax-and-music-recording residence. The McLaughlin name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Mac Lochlainn* (son of the Hebridean-Norse *Lochlann*, the Old-Irish-Gaelic small Norse-Norseman byname), the foundational small medieval Inishowen-and-Tír-Eóghain surname of the north-west Ulster Gaelic-Norse-frontier tradition; he carried the Doncaster-Irish-immigrant-classical-music variant of it into the foundation of small jazz-rock-fusion-guitar of the post-1969 small modern-jazz tradition.