John McLaughlin(1942–)

John McLaughlin was born at Doncaster in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 4 January 1942, fourth child of an Irish-immigrant concert-violinist and a piano teacher. He was trained on classical piano from four and took up the acoustic guitar at eleven on his mother's Spanish guitar.

He left school at sixteen, moved to London at seventeen, and worked through the 1960s on the London modern-jazz club circuit, playing the Soho jazz clubs, joining the Graham Bond Organisation and the Brian Auger Trinity, and working as a session guitarist. He recorded his first solo album, Extrapolation, in January 1969.

Miles Davis heard him during a 1969 London residency and hired him for In a Silent Way, recorded that February and released in July 1969, which is, by consensus of modern jazz criticism, the foundational jazz-rock-fusion album. He followed it with the Bitches Brew sessions of August 1969, the double album released in March 1970 that has been the foundational text of the subsequent jazz-rock-fusion tradition, and stayed with Davis on A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil and On the Corner.

He founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra in November 1971 as a full-time fusion ensemble under his own leadership; The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Birds of Fire (1973) made it the fusion ensemble of the 1970s. He then built the Shakti partnership with the tabla master Zakir Hussain and the violinist L. Shankar from 1973, the acoustic Indian-jazz formation he has returned to across the decades.

He has released over forty studio albums as leader or co-leader across 1969 to the present, ran the One Truth Band and the later fusion-revival ensembles, and was appointed OBE in 2017. He has lived on the Riviera since the early 1980s. The McLaughlin name, the Inishowen-and-Tír-Eóghain patronymic Mac Lochlainn, he carried from a Doncaster Irish-immigrant musical family into the foundation of jazz-rock-fusion guitar.