Billy Cobham ‎– Spectrum

"what is life but a Spectrum and what is music but life itself." ~ Billy Cobham, Jr.

i stumbled upon this in a used shop, assuming that cobham wouldn't accept too much of a downgrade from mclaughlin but having almost no knowledge of tommy bolin. it didn't take long before i realized that this record has turned into a genuine fusion classic and deserves to be regarded as such.

at this stage - the late 2000s - the mahavishnu orchestra has achieved a legendary standing amongst musicians as one of the (if not THE) most talented musical collectives that has ever existed. yes, a lot of what they wrote is relatively fairly commercial in nature and they certainly achieved a great deal of success during their short existence. yet, in hindsight, that's really a bonus and not a drawback.

my father wasn't even born yet when davis hit the scene and he was in grade school when bitches brew was released. as such, i have absolutely no first hand attachment to the fusion era and no capacity to understand it as anything more than a historical movement; i am as detached from this music as i am from the work of debussy. growing up in an era where pop = music and anything outside of the pop spectrum is viewed as obscure, i've been conditioned to look for hooks and melodies. of course, i can and will transcend this conditioning but it's still there and the satisfaction of succumbing to it is still real.

so, when something allows me to satisfy both my longing for real music and my conditioning for a catchy tune, it dots all of the i's and crosses all of the t's.....it has reached the pinnacle. from that perspective, it should be quite clear why i instantly fell in love with early mahavishnu.

that being said, i grew up listening to, and even studying, a lot of instrumental zappa so that would be my ultimate reference point in regards to jazz fusion. it wasn't until my early 20s that i took the time to actually search out some mahavishnu. i need to assume that most young people that become interested in this record will be musicians and will become interested in it due to association with cobham, hammer, goodman and/or mclaughlin. from that perspective, the cobham/hammer pairing will provide the listener with a familiar backdrop as there are long passages here involving these two guys that would not be out of place on an early mahavishnu record.

i am attacking this from a guitarists' perspective, and i do admit that i do hear quite a bit of mclaughlin in here. however, mclaughlin was never as interested in the blues as bolin was. yes, bolin will descend upon his guitar like a swarm of bees attacking a flower patch. yes, he'll ape on hendrix by using all manners of wahs, envelope followers, rotating speaker cabinets and other (at the time) high-tech and far-out psychedelic effects. however, he'll also pull a clapton on your ass from time to time and just chill out with the groove. coming from the perspective of somebody that grew up in a reality where jimmy page permeates all guitar playing, it doesn't just seem natural that a guitar player will embrace both styles - it seems obligatory. yet, to inject the feel of the blues into the abstraction of fusion was a novel idea at the time and something that today's grandparents give bolin a ton of credit for establishing.

something unique to the era was the decision to mix individual players in separate speakers so that the listener would know who was who. again, that seems bizarre from the perspective of somebody that grew up in an era where a band is a cohesive whole, almost a collective, and not a collection of individual players. yet, if you search out old vinyls you'll actually see it advertised on the front sleeve "tommy bolin in the right channel, jan hammer in the left channel". as nobody does this anymore, the approach seems fresh and unique to my distant ears.

some copies of the disc have the record split up into 10 tracks, but that kills the concept. excluding the first and fourth tracks, each track has a short introduction that explores more abstract territory - expressive drum solos for 2 and 3, a piano sonata for 5 and a "futuristic" sequencer noodle for track 6. once these excursions are handled, the main part of the track follows the mahavishnu-in-chill-out-mode template, at times even branching out into mahavishnu-does-bossa-nova.

it should probably also be noted that this disc is a longtime favorite sample library for hip-hop producers.

this is something that anybody interested in fusion must listen to and will enjoy but if you're just beginning the process of looking into the era, i'd say you should start with the first mahavishnu disc.