The Lost Trident Sessions

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While I'm not sure that I entirely believe the "Indiana Jones" scenario related in the sleevenotes, the unearthing of the Mahavishnu Orchestra's lost third album is a great achievement. The story's a straightforward one. The inaugural lineup of the group - guitarist John McLaughlin, keyboardist Jan Hammer, violinist Jerry Goodman and bassist Rick Laird - had already recorded two incendiary studio albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire. Halfway through 1973 they went into Trident Studios in London to record a third. But by then the band was falling apart under the weight of battling egos and the pressure of constant touring. There were disagreements about what to do with the material, so they delivered an anxious Columbia Records a live album instead: Between Nothingness and Eternity. Within a year the band had come apart at the seams and the studio sessions were forgotten, until being discovered in the Sony vaults in 1998. Worth the wait? What do you think? This album sees one of the greatest bands of a all time at their absolute creative peak. All the hallmarks of classic fusion are here: speed-freak soloing, tricksy time signatures, cod-ethnic melodies and chord changes, heart-stopping unison passages and a general blurring of the lines between composition and improvised solos. But while those very tendencies make too much jazz rock rather embarrassing - an excuse for flashy grandstanding - here the key word here is intensity. This music is at the very limit of what a small electric group can technically execute in real time, and the knowledge that things could fall apart at any point simply makes proceedings that much more thrilling. Listening to these tracks over a quarter of a century since they were recorded it's difficult to tell whether the fire in this music was a consequence of the frayed tempers within the group's ranks or something which flourished in spite of them; whatever, there's not a whole lot recorded since that's got close this music's demented, intense bravura.