Celebrated guitarist John McLaughlin enjoys a comfort zone with his current band. In the album liners, McLaughlin notes John Coltrane’s "A Love Supreme" as an influence to coincide with his astounding and comprehensive 40-year professional career, spanning historic affiliations with Miles Davis and Tony Williams. Within a jazz-fusion structured program, the quartet captures the spirituality of Coltrane’s masterpiece by seamlessly intertwining lyrically-rich and largely penetrating thematic opuses with layered evolvements.
McLaughlin’s velvety synth-guitar lines cast a harmonically appealing front amid his buoyant unison choruses and vibrant exchanges with keyboardist Gary Husband. Moreover, drummer Mark Mondesir acts as an igniter along with bassist Etienne M’Bappe’s fluid and pulsating bottom end. McLaughlin’s harmonically attractive lines weave in and out of the ensemble performances in concert with peek-a-boo-like evasiveness. And his thrusting speed-of-light single note attacks are contrasted by rousing call and response grooves with Husband.
The piece titled "Lost and Found" is an upbeat ballad, where Husband creates a vast musical plane via his darkly shaded synth voicings and perky jazz-blues motif, executed on acoustic piano. Needless to state, the unit abides by a democratic mode of operations and rockets the proceedings into overdrive on "Recovery."
Distinct styles and a gelling group-centric format are two prominent attributes that place this quartet in a class of its own, yet many of us wouldn’t expect otherwise. McLaughlin merges eloquence with a consortium of stinging tension and release statements throughout this resonating engagement.