Customer Reviews

What a man? - By: John Ferngrove, 15 Aug 2008
I've held off from reviewing Floating Point to now because a John McLaughlin release always entails such a huge amount of information to assimilate. An extreme example is Live at the Royal Festival Hall: 27th November 1989 which it's taken twenty years of listening to, on & off, before it finally blew my socks off.

So the first thing about this amazing film is it takes you right into the essence of what Floating Point is about, & will now short circuit that comprehension lag. I now totally get where every track is coming from. Furthermore, as many of the musicians on Floating Point are also familiar from the Remember Shakti discs, Remember Shakti - The Believer, Remember Shakti & Remember Shakti: Saturday Night In Bombay, this will require me to go back & revisit those releases, which at the time I admired & respected, but which didn't seem to have the essence of the original Shakti. I will revisit them with a view this time to appreciating themin their own right.

The other thing that shines through is what an amazing being McLaughlin is. He is truly an elder statesmen of music who has been the inspiration for a whole new generation, or two, of young musicians, both east & west, who will be expanding the slender east-west bridge he first built into a trans-global super-highway. I predict it is not long until we see the emergence of the first Indian jazz supergroup, that will have its own exotic & intense ethnic flavour but will still be recognisably jazz. Who knows what might follow from that?

Jazz is the melting pot & always has been, ever since marching bands collided with bar-room pianolas, & Dixie collided with Debussy, & on the story goes. Another decade or two & some yet unnamed genius will spring Chinese jazz upon the world. It may even be happening right now for all I know.

You really do see awesome pieces of music developing, part by part, evolving from initial conversations involving a lot of clapping & the daka-daka drum language, whose name I can't spell.

And you also see how lovingly & respectfully John encourages his musicians to let go & give their absolute best. It is a true meeting of minds.

The film is beautifully shotin a studio that is more like a Raja's palace. We move frequently between clips of the communication process, whereby John lets the guys know what he wants, snatches of performance & interviews & commentary from the musicians which are very thoughtful & insightful. The last ten minutes of the film is the climax where the band just lets rip to do a full take on one of the songs.

If you love McLaughlin, Shakti or even the best of Bollywood this is for you. If you have an interestin what goes on a studio when a top class album is created, or an interestin top flight musicians reflecting seriously on the significance of music & the interior processes involvedin its creation then again, this is for you.