Devotion

John McLaughlin’s Devotion initially arose from a 1970 session wrangled by producer Alan Douglas, who had previously attempted to put a (still unreleased) set into motion featuring McLaughlin and a recently jazz-fusion-besotted Jimi Hendrix. While that never panned out, Douglas still set McLaughlin up with Hendrix’s post-Band of Gypsys unit (drummer Buddy Miles and bassist Billy Rich) providing the groove, and Larry Young, McLaughlin’s Tony Williams Lifetime bandmate, flashing his percussive technique on the keyboards. And while the final culmination of that project disappointed McLaughlin behind the scenes — he’s publicly criticized Douglas’s mixing and editing of Devotion — it’s still a blast to hear him in the freewheeling transitional period between his Bitches Brew/Lifetime breakthrough and the emergence of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, diving headlong into heavy acid rock in ways he’d never fully return to. The psych/metal crossover appeal might be at the expense of all but the most rock-friendly jazz sensibilities: here, Miles and Rich tend to bludgeon more than they swing, Young’s organ is a chaotic squall that veers between ambient drones and choppy melodic counterpoints, and McLaughlin’s playing sounds like the noisiest and most expressively frenetic search for enlightenment there is. But the fire-and-hailstones conflagration of “Dragon Song,” “Marbles”’s gonzo extrapolation of Norman Whitfield’s psychedelic-Motown drive, and the hundred-story highwire blues of “Purpose of When” work within those parameters so effectively that even if it’s easy to forget this is supposed to be a jazz album (at least, in all but the most proto-Soft Machine sense), its sense of unfettered experimentation and technique is a long distance beyond what most hard rockers were capable of at the time, too.