“Motherfucker” is one word you could use to describe John McLaughlin. The legendary British jazz guitarist, along with his current band 4th Dimension, certainly lived up that pithy epithet last night in a show at the Melbourne Recital Centre as part of the Melbourne Festival.
It was one of McLaughlin’s former band leaders, Miles Davis, who recognised McLaughlin’s singular talents on the guitar all the way back in 1968.
“I heard him [McLaughlin] play with Tony [Williams] up at Count Basie’s and he was a motherfucker, so I asked him to make the date,” Davis recalls in his highly entertaining autobiography.