When McLaughlin met Miles and Young
A fusion record where the personalities collide as much as the genres do.
Devotion arrived early in John McLaughlin's career, recorded while he was still anchored to Tony Williams Lifetime. It's a strange album in the best sense—you can hear McLaughlin's guitar language forming in real time, but the session pulls in so many other voices that the record never settles into any one thing. Buddy Miles brings a funky, muscular swing that comes straight from his work in Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys. Larry Young on organ is the real centerpiece here, pushing McLaughlin toward spacey, almost spiritual textures rather than the cleaner fusion lines he'd pursue later. It's a collaboration that actually feels like a collaboration, not a showcase with sidemen filling slots.
The problem is the production. McLaughlin himself complained about Alan Douglas's final mix, and you can hear why—there's a murkiness to the recording that works sometimes and undermines the music other times. The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings gave it three stars, which feels about right: solid and interesting but held back by technical limitations. If you're coming to this expecting the McLaughlin of his later Douglas records or his work with Lifetime, you'll be startled by how raw and unfocused Devotion feels.
It's also not the place to start if you want to understand McLaughlin's trajectory. Better to begin with his Lifetime material or his own later fusion records. But if you know where he ended up and want to hear him working through possibilities with musicians pulling him in different directions, Devotion has real value. The organ-and-drums interplay with Miles and Young alone makes the album worth the listen, even if the overall package never quite resolves.
