John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension, Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2022, earMusic ****

To the diehards perhaps who always like to journey deeper than most into an artist’s hinterland, this however ecstatically received in the room live album isn’t a patch on Live at the Royal Festival Hall or the far more recent (and closer comparator) Fourth Dimension 2017 album Live at Ronnie Scott’s.

Speaking French to the Montreux audience is more novel. An Englishman speaking French in public – maybe less of a shock than to some – given the speaker in question has lived in Monaco for years. That’s if you solely relate to English guitar great John McLaughlin going even further back to his Mahavishnu Orchestra days and The Inner Mounting Flame or his work with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew.

That said it IS John McLaughlin we’re talking about, one of the greatest jazz guitarists alive whose name can be typed in the same short sentence as just three others, still around: Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and John Scofield. And the guitar don from Doncaster cooks up a storm in plenty of places on a live set that includes a version of a piece synonymous with Pharoah Sanders, ‘The Creator Has a Masterplan.’

If you liked the storming Ronnie’s live album referred to above in particular the nuanced ‘Gaza City’ from that album is among the tunes recorded here on this Swiss recording at a festival that McLaughlin has enjoyed a long association with. Other tunes include a superb version of ‘Abbaji’ dedicated to Alla Rakha.

There’s also a panoramic rather moving treatment of Italian film composer Piero Piccioni’s piece written in 1971 for the Kirk Douglas co-produced flop The Light at the Edge of the World, the title adapted from a Jules Verne novel set among a piratical South Atlantic world.

Black Light (2015) – that McLaughlin’s fellow Yorkshireman Husband and the Cameroonian Mbappé also join the Mahavishnu on – I reckon is the guitar icon’s best album since the 1990s and new treatments of pieces from that album opener ‘Kiki,’ ‘El Hombre Que Sabia’ and again ‘Gaza City’ are reprised. Every self respecting McLaughlin fan will not so much desire but passionately need this from the master. Live recordings seem to draw out a whole new aspect deep down inside his artistry and this album captures that injection of heat and inspiration an audience out front invokes and helps ladle on so appropriately.