In context of this review of Thieves and Poets, the second guitar concerto of John McLaughlin, I want to run my mouth about ones ability to recognize a truly musical work.

We have been dumb-ed down in the guitar world because we come to serious music as a secondary consideration of being in popular music. You know, the guitar is the battle-ax of anarchy, right? Anarchy is wearing tattoos and body piercing and not voting.

In the beginnings of R&R the guitar was the motto instrument. Especially the electric guitar, while Elvis slammed an acoustic guitar, we were in transition from roots and within less than a generation we had rock hybrids like fusion jazz and classical rock.

Our distance from roots, now, depends on how much we dispense with the novelty of things like blazing speed, and standard gestures; the need to incorporate odd statistics of change over musical material to shock and dissonances both structural and harmonic is yet another thing. The latter is a result of trying to prove us to a serious music world, when we blaze mindlessly we prove to each other that we are worth our metal.

I've come very close to reviewing things I do not like because they are so blazingly fast, for little musical reasons, or changing so inorganically just to impress guitar players who happen to be malnutrition-ed in ways of assessing what genius really is. It is amazing how guitarists are so easily fooled by cheap sideshow tricks. I would consider this the Paginini Effect, where Nicolo sawed into his strings so they'd pop and he would complete the piece on one string. I'd say the consideration was of little musical value.

John McLaughlin is a genius although he says, "I'm always learning." Yes, he is still learning more as this is the better of his two concertos. The first one, The Mediterranean Concerto is a fine piece, but of the two, Thieves and Poets marks the culmination of the first-the promise of the first.

Below is from Verve's Website, the record company releasing, and offers some basic biographical information:

From Al DiMeola, Pat Metheny, and Mike Stern to John Scofield, Bill Connors, and Scott Henderson, John McLaughlin has been a strong influence on many of the top jazz/fusion guitarists of the last 30 years. McLaughlin's classic recordings of the 1970s have long been regarded as essential listening for anyone with even a casual interest in fusion, and if the British improviser had decided to retire in 1980, he still would have gone down in history as one of jazz-rock's most influential axemen.

Born in Yorkshire, England on January 4, 1942, the guitarist is well known for his eclectic taste in music. McLaughlin was a child when he first fell in love with jazz and the blues, and he was just 11 years old when he began studying and playing the guitar. The 1960s found him playing jazz, rock, and blues in his native England, where he worked with Alexis Korner and Ginger Baker, among others, before moving to New York at the end of the decade. McLaughlin had a busy year in 1969 he recorded his debut album, Extrapolation, and started working with two seminal voices in early fusion: Tony Williams (who employed McLaughlin and organist Larry Young in his trailblazing group Lifetime) and Miles Davis. Never afraid to forge ahead, Davis had done a lot to popularize cool jazz and modal post-bop in the past and he continued to break new ground when he introduced fusion on his 1969 sessions In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, both of which feature McLaughlin's playing. The guitarist was also featured on 1970's A Tribute To Jack Johnson, another Davis gem of the time.

Like bebop in the 1940s and modal jazz in the early 1960s, fusion was controversial. Jazz purists felt that rock and funk rhythms had no place in jazz, but thankfully, McLaughlin disagreed and let his musical instincts guide him. After participating in Davis' and Williams' groundbreaking fusion combos, McLaughlin founded an influential group of his own in 1971: The Mahavishnu Orchestra, which boasted such greats as drummer Billy Cobham and keyboardist Jan Hammer. By the time Mahavishnu broke up in 1975, it had recorded several classic albums for Columbia (including Birds of Fire, Between Nothingness and Eternity, and Visions of the Emerald Beyond) and gone down in history as one of the 1970's most influential fusion outfits.

In 1975, McLaughlin did the unexpected by founding Shakti, an acoustic group that employed traditional Indian musicians (including tabla player Zakir Hussain and violinist L. Shankar, Ravi Shankar's nephew) and underscored the guitarist's interest in India's music, culture, and religion. Shakti reminded listeners that McLaughlin was as appealing on the acoustic guitar as he was on its electric counterpart, and proved that he wasn't about to confine himself to playing any one style of music exclusively. Indeed, McLaughlin was heard in a variety of musical settings in the 1980's everything from a brief Mahavishnu Orchestra reunion in 1984 to an acoustic guitar summit with Al DiMeola and Paco de Lucia in 1982 to a classical album with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988.

McLaughlin was no less eclectic in the 1990s, when his Verve projects ranged from 1993's acoustic Time Remembered: John McLaughlin Plays Bill Evans (a tribute to the late pianist) to sessions featuring organist Joey DeFrancesco (1993's Tokyo Live and 1994's John Coltrane-minded After the Rain) to an acoustic McLaughlin/DiMeola/de Lucia reunion in 1996. It was in 1997 that McLaughlin reunited with Zakir Hussain and a reconfigured version of Shakti for several U.K. concerts that were documented on Verve's two-CD set Remember Shakti.

"I'm a guitar player that's what I am primarily, that's what I'll always be," McLaughlin has been quoted as saying. "(And) I'm an eternal learner. I don't want to stop learning because I feel that no matter what I've done, I'm really just beginning again. I don't think I'll ever stop learning."

I can remember hearing Birds of Fire, Mahavishnu Orchestra's first release in the early 1970's. In this group, McLaughlin was possibly the leader. His sensibilities may preclude him from saying leader as the band was outrageously good, and could not have survived unless the virtuosity was equal. My impression was that I had to aspire to do this and it would be a long while before I did. I was young and impressionable and John McLaughlin's style was always recognizable in his acoustic ensembles or whatever he did, and he has stayed with me as one of guitar's all time greats.

John McLaughlin became synonyms with musical pointillism on the guitar, in a highly developed linear and harmonic sense. There was always a compositional interest to McLaughlin's pieces, as they existed in fusion jazz, but not without classical music workings, both mechanically and formally. But texturally, his is a world music/jazz fabric.

Thieves and Poets is a beautifully wrought work in the standard three-movement concerto form.

Movement 1, he does call each movement a "Part," starts dark and murky and sounding not unlike a Rodrigo, orchestrated and presented like the beginning of a bullfight. The opening, in ambiguous tonality, serves as the dominant of a beautiful first theme of brightness that modulates in perfectly blended orchestra and soloist.

The orchestration is far more accomplished than the first concerto and there are many levels of interplay in this composite instrument without covering the guitar. It is an extremely crisp orchestra and written in dabs of orchestral color, and like McLaughlin's guitar performance, it is a virtuosic dealing with the sections.

The form is a bit like a concerto grosso as there is a solo instrument group, including another accompanying and harmonizing guitar, and a violin as a voice partner with McLaughlin's steel string guitar.

This movement culminates with an extremely lyrical choral part that couples the solo guitar, cello and violin. This offsets the quick moving preceding movement's dance of instruments.

The movement closes with the first theme and with some very nice guitar work from the accompanying guitar's harmonics and chords.

The second movement is typically in second movement concerto form, a slow movement. As in the romantic concerto, but more sounding like a jazz progression of chordal ambiguity, the second movement has all the hallmarks of Gershwin as filtered by McLaughlin. The beautifully descending progression is the mark of a tone painter, with common note blending as movement descends. It is just stunning! The clarinet solo is so Gershwin.

Make no mistake the language is of the guitar and McLaughlin. McLaughlin's language is modern jazz. And modern jazz is texturally different from classical music, but vertically-harmonically both are marked by a beautiful ambiguity that is dissonant but soothing.

The third movement is the usual presto as in concerti form. Suffering for lack of liner notes and not being able to find information on the Internet I am sure that there is the use of synthesized horns in this movement, none the less. There is in this movement, as well as the first movement, a Spanish feel with the use of the Phrygian type scale and the postured flamenco stylizations. This arches nicely over the middle movement, and makes for a satisfying classic concerto form.

This is the best classical guitar concerto I've yet to hear. I'm sorry for you Prince Valliant purists, but it is written for, and performed on the steel string guitar.

As with all of McLaughlin's work Thieves and Poets is highly personal, and I know that John Williams won't perform it, although Williams has performed with the rock group Sky and will perform on other guitar types, I doubt that he has the necessary chops to tackle it.

This is not unfortunate though. This is a genre buster and thoroughly McLaughlin's piece. And for this I am happy. I am happy to say that this is the best classical guitar concerto done on a steel string guitar, and I have no problem saying this.

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