Regardless of our differences in view on McLaughlin’s performance, I’d like to thank you for posting this clip and starting this discussion. I have enjoyed it very much, and I have been practising my Cherokee licks all weekend in a surprising revival of my otherwise rather slumbering hobby of guitar playing.

In my next life, I am going to be a jazz guitarist. (Although I am going to model myself on Joe Pass rather than John McLaughlin).

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken up for round tomatoes. I have on occasion defended Budweiser beer, but that’s because I think it’s an excellent product, wholly deserving of the numerous international trade show awards it won in the first half of the twentieth century (it also has a longer pedigree than the Czechoslovakian Budvar, and IMO Anheuser-Busch got really badly screwed in their WIPO case over the name “Budweiser”).

Opinions can differ about whether or not it’s a good piece of music – as I said, I liked it, but I’d be pretty scared of someone whose entire record collection sounded like that. What I will die in a trench for, though, is the proposition that McL was playing music, which is what bebop snobs want to deny, and which gets them into logical contortions like the one in comment 133, where CW describes a Pat Metheny solo that wasn’t really a musical statement – it just sounded that way.

I’m neither an expert nor a real “aficionado”—whatever exactly that is—but I just wish that we could have heard McLaughlin play for a little longer without the horns trying to drown him out.

Alex is, I think, on to the real problem here: a pedestrian, bloated, self-important arrangement. It’s so bad, so…ordinary (like most of the Tonight Show Band’s arrangements) that I doubt Bird himself could have overcome it. Probably he wouldn’t have tried.

McLaughlin’s tone on that guitar is no match for a powerhouse band like the Tonight Show guys.

There isn’t an acoustic guitar in the world that could have survived either that arrangement or its sheer volume. An electric rock guitar wouldn’t have been any better a fit since the player would have had to use volume to overcome volume, which would lead him in another, rocky-er direction, and that woukld have clashed with the arrangement, too.

The third problem with the arrangement is that it isn’t set up to give a soloist any support. When you arrange a piece to back a soloist, you arrange it for that particular musician’s style, to give him openings to launch from and rhythmic and harmonic support that suits his playing.

That arrangement sounded to me like a standard Tonight Show band arrangement that they grabbed at the last minute, or else they said, “Well, John, this is what we’re doing tonight. You can play on this if you want,” and then winged it in rehearsal (where there’s only time to mark the changes and little else).

Also, the placing of the solo spots seemed arbitrary and unhelpful, as if they’d been picked at random in a chart that originally hadn’t included them. I really suspect that the arrangement was written as a before- or after-show piece (probably after, given all the horns) and then just drafted to do duty for McLaughlin’s appearance. Was it a last-minute gig? “John McLaughlin’s in town. Let’s get him on and let him do something with the band.” I don’t know.

Finally, I know how hard it is to even hear McLaughlin over that steam whistle in the background, but there’s nothing whatever wrong with his tone. It’s beautifully articulated, clean as, say, an Eddie Condon solo, and unadulterated by tricks or the kind of horseshit cliches that arrangement is demanding.

As for his musicality, once again I think the arrangement is at fault for the fact that some of you can’t hear it. McLaughlin’s ideas are cohesive, playful, and rhythmically complex – far more so than anything the band is doing. It was if he decided that since he couldn’t beat them or join them, he’d just go off in his own direction and leave them to batter around trying to keep up.

They failed, not him. Those solos, especially the first one, are so good, so inventive, that he left the band in the dust almost as soon as he started playing them. They make one wonder what would have happened if he’d concentrated on jazz alone for a while. A modern Django? Could have been. All the elements are there.

Don’t let the speed or the dazzling technique fool you: they’re in service to brilliant musical ideas, not replacing them.

I’m not sure what you meant by that. What I meant was that if Coltrane took the time to write and memorize a solo, it most likely would have been move than basic scale patterns over the changes, which is what you do when your just trying ot cope.

Puccini is ripe for snobbery not because it isn’t popular and vulgar but because it pretends not to be and in doing that it reduces itself to fascist kitsch. Aristocrats aren’t snobs, they have no need to be. Snobbery is the pretension of certain members of the middle class to being better than their peers. “Hyacinth Bucket” of Keeping up Appearances is a snob.

What you’re describing is a shallow attempt at a defense of democracy and democratic art [as if democracy were anti-intellectual by nature!] against what people want to see as aristocratic. And this about Jazz, the epitome of democratic art in the last century [and no that’s not an oxymoron]. It makes much more sense in this context to see this as I said as an expression of the anxiety of experts around connoisseurs (and no I’m not talking about geeks commenting on you tube). As if there were no difference between a race car mechanic and a driver. This is a running theme here: experts see the world through the lens of their expertise, but they don’t want to talk about the limits of their framing devices. So we get things like D2 doing his Brad DeLong imitation, defending cheap beer and perfectly round inedible tomatoes in the name of the ideas of individualism and economic progress. As if ideas were ever as subtle as tastes (or words). To be fair I’ve never heard DeLong defend lousy food, at least for himself. His blog reads like the home shopping network for the post-grad bourgeois home. But he’s a full on vulgarian who claims not to be. As if data were synonymous with honesty.

If you want to hear a great pop jazz guitar solo, listen to Larry Carlton on Kid Charlemagne. And as for honesty, there’s an article on the Goncourt Brothers in the NYR this week. Check it out.

For me, jazz tunes ought to have a deliciously sexy groove—the genre began its life as dance music. This performance comes across as hard work and no fun.

“de gustibus non disputandum est.” Except that even with fads and fashion history is a pretty good judge.

But Bouguereau and Norman Rockwell painted real good didn’t they? Lots of pretty pictures.

this looks perilously like a metaphysical property which exists over and above the actual notes played.