Shakti at Pori Jazz Festival, Finland, 1976 (misdated 1977) performing 'What Need Have I For This, What Need Have I For That? I Am Dancing At The Feet Of My Lord - All Is Bliss, All Is Bliss'. No, it wasn't a single.

In the midst of the jazz-fusion maelstrom of America in the early ‘70s, Shakti was a non-electric explosion which happened by stealth. Mahavishnu John McLaughlin had met tabla maestro Zakir Hussain when he attended a rhythm workshop the latter was giving in New York City in 1970. McLaughlin was already studying vina with Dr S Ramanathan at Wesleyan University near NYC at this stage. After that, via Ravi Shankar, Zakir secured teaching positions at first the University of Washington, Seattle, and AACM in San Francisco. When the Mahavishnu Orchestra were playing Berkeley in San Francisco in November 1972 John got in touch with Zakir and ended up in a jam at Zakir’s home, along with sarod legend Ali Akbhar Khan (who had himself jammed on BBC TV in 1963 with guitarist Julian Bream – a novelty at the time, but one of the earliest and most seminal of ‘fusion’ encounters).

John had already met violinist L Shankar by this stage. Shankar was vina instructor Dr Ramanathan’s nephew, and also had himself a teaching position at Wesleyan University. Shankar had another uncle teaching at Wesleyan: mrindangam player R Raghavan. Shankar and John had already jammed at the latter’s New York pad.

In 1974, while the newly launched 11-piece Mahavishnu Orchestra Mk2 was his prime preoccupation, John introduced his two Indian friends Zakir Hussain and L Shankar to each other with a view to performing shows as an acoustic trio. R Raghavan was, however, brought in to make it a quartet. Small shows as Shakti (the name meaning ‘creative intelligence, beauty and power’) were apparently played during 1974 when schedules allowed, and studio demos (circulating unofficially, never officially released) were made in New York.

In July 1975 – in between Mahavishnu Orchestra dates – Shakti put on its first significant concert at Southampton College, Long Island, in honour of John McLaughlin’s spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy. John had the concert privately taped but was so pleased with the results that, some months later – with the approval of his fellow musicians - it was offered to CBS for release (appearing in 1976 as the three track LP ‘Shakti With John McLaughlin’, the first of three albums from the band).

John was playing a custom made Mark Whitebook guitar on the Southampton College recording, designed to allow greater note bends commensurate with the style of music being played. However, the instrument which became known as the ‘Shakti guitar’ was only built, by Abe Wechtar of Gibson, in the interval between the one-off 1975 concert and Shakti as a touring entity in 1976. The ‘Shakti guitar’ had scalloped frets, allowing even greater micro-tonal bends, plus seven sympathetic drone strings lying diagonally across the sound hole, which could be tuned according to the piece being played.

Confusingly, John is pictured on the cover of ‘Shakti With John McLaughlin’ with the ‘Shakti guitar’, despite Whitebook’s instrument being the one played therein. A second discrepancy occurs on the back cover of the album – the 4-piece line-up of the band appearing being slightly different to the one featured on the record. When Shakti were offered tours of America and Europe in Spring 1976, Raghavan declined, fearing the loss of his Wesleyan teaching position. Zakir Hussain suggested as a replacement his friend TH Vinayakram, on ghatam (clay pot). Vinayakam taught his instrument in San Francisco during summer but returned to India for winter. It was while holidaying together in India in late 1975 or early 1976 that John McLaughlin and L Shankar met up with Vinayakram and jammed for the first time – after which they were sure they’d found the right man for the job. (Confusingly, CBS added Vinayakram’s name to the personnel playing on the recordings on ‘Shakti With John McLaughlin’ – not the case.)

Shakti toured for two years – throughout 1976-77 – and released three albums: ‘Shakti With John McLaughlin’ featuring incredible, long-form extemporisations, and the studio albums ‘A Handful Of Beauty’ and ‘Natural Elements’ based on shorter, arguably more accessible pieces, all blending jazz-fusion western ideas with Indian music traditions and sensibilities. The virtuosity on display from all concerned was, arguably, even greater than that which audiences were used to from any version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And yet, as John told me in an interview in 1997, ‘I lost record sales with Shakti…’. In America this was still the era of stadium rock and conventional ‘guitar heroes’ and McLaughlin’s proto-world music acoustic band was perhaps too much too soon for mass appreciation.

Under pressure from CBS to return to electric music (and, tellingly, his 1978 LP would be called ‘Electric Guitarist’ and feature a roll-call of jazz-fusion stars like Jack Bruce, Billy Cobham, Jerry Goodman, Tony Williams and Stanley Clarke), John regretfully told his Shakti collaborators that he was disbanding the group at the end of 1977.

Zakir Hussain returned to teaching at the Ali Akbhar College of Music on the US West Coast; Vinayakram returned to Madras to teach; L Shankar, however, veered into McLaughlin’s jazz-fusion world. He played with both Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin’s short-lived One Truth Band in the next couple of years, with Zappa producing his debut solo LP ‘Touch Me There’. From 1980 Shankar would exclusively play a double-necked electric violin, with 5 strings on each neck allowing the full range of a string quartet.

Shakti reunited for a brief tour in 1982, although McLaughlin – with a finger injury – had to be replaced for the tour by Larry Coryell. In 1984 a second reunion tour happened, this time only in India, with reviewers reportedly ecstatic at a band which had never sounded better. Whatever happened on this tour, L Shankar and John McLaughlin have not performed together since. Hussain, however, has collaborated on numerous occasions since then with McLaughlin, on stage and record – and has also recorded separately with Shankar. In 1987, Shankar, Hussain and Vinayakram all appeared together on the L Shankar album ‘Nobody Told Me’, and in 2000 the trio reunited again on ‘Eternal Light’.

In 1994 Hussain released ‘The Best Of Shakti’ on his own label, Moment Records, the success of which triggered the live reunion in September 1997. McLaughlin, Hussain and Vinayakram – without Shankar but adding Hariprasad Chaurasia on flute – performed four concerts in England marking the 50th anniversary of India’s independence (Oldham, London, Birmingham, Southampton). The band, however, performed without a collective name.

As had been the case with the original Shakti’s 1975 concert, John had the shows recorded privately… and once again felt they were so good as to demand release, with his current label Universal obliging. When a band name could no longer be side-stepped, Remember Shakti was the clever moniker decided upon.

As before, when the band were encouraged to tour, a reluctance for members to abandon teaching posts intervened: Chaurasia (at Rotterdam Conservatory) and Vinayakram (still teaching at his father’s school in Madras) politely declined. Vinayakram’s son, V. Selvaganesh, came in on South Indian percussion, while the new melody instrumentalist would be mandolin virtuoso U. Srinivas, whom John had first met as a child prodigy in 1983 at the Berlin Jazz Festival.

The new Remember Shakti began touring in Summer 1999, starting in Jerusalem and taking in Montreux Jazz Festival. A live album, ‘The Believer’, was recorded on the tour. In December 2000 the band held its own festival in Bombay, with various Indian guests joining them, resulting in the live album ‘Saturday Night In Bombay’. Versions of Remember Shakti have continued to be an ongoing concern, interweaving with McLaughlin’s other performing vehicles.

SHAKTI CHRONOLOGY 1974-1977

Detailed Shakti info is much scarcer than Mahavishnu Orchestra info, but this is at least a skeleton of their activities. Hopefully to be added to… I’ve indicated where things are easily available, officially or otherwise, as recordings or films.

Shakti’s two Montreux Festival shows (from 1976 and 1977) are both included as audio on the pricey limited edition McLaughlin 17CD box set ‘The Montreux Concerts’. The Montreux Festival was routinely filmed at that stage and 45 minutes of the 1976 performance is circulating (most/all on youtube), but only 7 minutes from the 1977 one (not on youtube). Elsewhere on youtube is an 50-minute Canadian/French TV documentary and 20 minutes from the 1976 Pori Jazz Festival in Finland (although this is labelled incorrectly as 1977). 28 minutes of film from Italy in 1977 is also floating around on torrent sites, as is one track filmed in 1977 at John’s New York pad for a UK TV show.

A ‘JF’ in brackets indicates audio that is available for free from www.jazzfusion.tv
A ‘DrF’ in brackets indicates auduio/video available for free from www.drfusion.blogspot.com
An ‘SCV’ in brackets indicates an item available at www.soundcolourvibration.com
A ‘Net’ in brackets indicates the item is floating around elsewhere on the net.
A ‘BC’ in brackets indicates the show exists in part or in full on bootleg cassette, if not digitally circulating.

1974

?/74 New York, studio session (JF, SCV)

1975

5/7/75 Southampton College, Long Island [recording of ‘Shakti With John McLaughlin’]

1976

9/3/76 New York, NY (JF)

18/4/76 Orpheum Theatre, Boston, MA (JF)
24/4/76 Tower Theatre, Upper Darby, PA (DrF)

6/7/76 Montreux Jazz Festival, SWITZERLAND [FILM on youtube; audio on ‘Montreux Concerts’ 17CD set]
16/7/76 Pori Jazz Festival FINLAND
17/7/76 Pori Jazz Festival FINLAND [FILM on youtube, mislabelled 1977]

27/7/76 Hammersmith Odeon, London ENGLAND (+ Weather Report + Cobham/Duke Band)
28/7/76 Hammersmith Odeon, London ENGLAND (BC)

8/76 ‘A Handful Of Beauty’ sessions, London ENGLAND

1977

?/77 TV Documentary, CANADIAN PBS [FILMED on tour in France; on youtube] (DrF)
?/77 TV spot, New York [‘Two Sisters’ FILMED for UK TV show]
?/77 SPAIN (BC)

7/1/77 Seattle, WA (JF)

13/3/77 Shaboo Inn, Willamantic, Connecticut
31/3/77 Venice ITALY
?/4/77 Torino ITALY (DrF)
?/4/77 Viareggio ITALY (FILM) (Net)

10/4/77 Theatre De Champes Elysees, Paris FRANCE (BC)
11/4/77 Berklee Performance centre, Boston MA (JF)

?/5/77 Zurich SWITZERLAND
9/5/77 BBC Radio 1 session (John Peel), London ENGLAND [rec date; tx 13/5/77] (SCV)
12/5/77 BBC Radio 1 ‘In Concert’, London ENGLAND [rec date; tx 28/5/77] (JF, DrF, SCV)

7/77 ‘Natural Elements’ sessions, Geneva SWITZERLAND
8/7/77 Montreux Jazz Festival, SWITZERLAND [FILM part circulating; audio on ‘Montreux Concerts’ 17CD set]

8/10/77 Seattle, WA (JF, DrF)
16/10/77 San Diego, CA (JF)

4/11/77 Boston, MA (BC)
21/11/77 Cellar Door, Washington DC (JF, DrF)

but you guys might get off on this. And in any case everyone should see it.

should check out the DVD "Remember Shakti: The Way of Beauty", an absorbing package of performances from the reformed group. The DVD includes footage of the original Shakti taken at Montreux 1976.

This clip of the reformed group begins with a refrain that will be familiar to fans of late period MO.

Good work once again Mr H.

I'd like to mention one of my all time favourite albums - Making Music which Zakir made with John McLaughlin, Jan GArbarek and Hariprasad Chaurasia. It's a beautiful album.

Here's the title track.

...no idea what the source is (might be one of the Montreux Festival performances, 76 or 77, with Spanish subtitles, rebroadcast at some point on Spanish TV later, hence John McL saying 'Adios amigos' at the start). But the performance is incredible:

...this time it's effectively Shakti (Hussain, Shankar, Vinyakram) + Larry Coryell. The group is not called Shakti, but I guess it's a spin-off from that 1982 tour when Larry replaced John who had an injured finger. The tunes are 'Making Music' (which Carl P mentioned above as a fave rave) and 'Sally', with an unidentified second guitarist. It's from UK TV - wonder was it one of those Sunday morning 'programmes for Asian viewers' they had in the 70s and 80s? I was always fascinated by the music they had on those (otherwise drab) shows...

...I'm not sure we're left any the wiser other than confirmation that here are a couple of musicians who respect each other's traditions. But what the heck - their music speaks...

...here's a lovely piece of music from a remember Shakti concert in India last month. There's times in the first couple of minutes where it bears remarkable similarity to the Cocteau Twins 'Pearly Dewdrops'. Which can only be a good thing.