John McLaughlin: ‘I tell my hands how beautiful they are. Now I have no pain at all’

From the Irish Times

Identity is a fluid concept for guitarist John McLaughlin. He was born in Yorkshire; forged as a guitarist in Swinging Sixties London; summoned to New York to play with the cream of American jazz; became leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, deeply connected to India and its music; then a globe-trotting jazz superstar; and for the last four decades has based himself in Monaco. So just who does John McLaughlin think he is?

“My entire musical career is based on black American music,” he says via Zoom from his Riviera home. “Whether its rhythm and blues, funk or jazz, whether its straight-ahead jazz, Coltrane or the greats, this is my music, this is my school. But my answer would be: I feel European if I feel anything at all.”

In fact, he’s very proud of his Irish name and first visited the land of his ancestors in the early 1960s, when, as a young guitarist with Herbie Goins and the Night-Timers, he was part of the glamorous international jet set that flew into Dublin in 1962 for the 21st-birthday party of Guinness heir Tara Browne at Luggala in the Wicklow mountains.

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