John MacLaughlin : The Maddening Torments of a Bliss
As a purist and almost a puritan in music, I have always viewed overt experimentations; well let us put it this way with a bit of a scoff. Consequently I considered the genre fusion with a skepticism - some of the grand experiments like Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin , with all due respect to the great maestroes was not the best of their endeavours-though I thought Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass did hit a chord. To me thus east would remain east and west would remain west and waters of Daneuve and Ganges would never meet.
Also as a collector of music , for some reason, Jazz and blues remained a neglected part... And I was wrong and thank god I was totally, blatantly wrong, mistaken and was in the error... and the guy who proved me wrong in eerie hours , close to midnight crossing to the other day was none other than the great John Maclaughlin and his fourth dimension.
It was magical yet real, it was ravaging yet permanent, it was desolate yet wholesome. It was fragmented yet whole, it was mercurial yet shining . It created a total blissful silence within me and in an uncanny way released my pet demons that I harbour. The interplay of rhythms, the surreal structure of juxtaposition of hymns and percussion, the ethereal sounds that emanated from bass, the dissonance fading into passages of melody, the rusty husky wrought contours of long and winding hiss and harmony were really pleasantly and unreally unbearable.
The whim of a grand maestro, his playful antics with his fellow mates, his bold and at times laconic strokes floated us in an unreal space of events beneath the lull in horizon. The whisk of flashes in motes of dust of the arena where ebullience already ruled was thrown into a height of ecstasy. The congruence and confluence of the group, the process of turning into one unit and separate entities, the listless chasm in fluid galaxies revealed the hints, innuendo and the pranks of joy and hurrah and lightness of being there in null.
The whisper and whistle of existence, darkness, shadows and delight were intermingled in zones unknown to the equilibrium we maintain in us. To end it a jugalbandi with percussion, a grand hurrah a finale of shattered all nuances of reclusive tentativeness in labyrinths of naught and nothing transporting us to the point of bliss
John and the fourth dimension unshackled me, my core, my crux. It hacked me, stole me, streamed me, ruined me.In one word it was unreal. My long lost streets in deja vu thus found a way in an ethereal blue inn . The rainbows from one end of the horizon to the other thus glittered in dazzles of beauty, glee and lees.
Photo credits : Imtiaz Alam Beg
Munzur–I-Muqshed, artist, poet and civil servant. He can be reached at [email protected].
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