Mahavishnu Orchestra

"You Know, You Know" 

Live In Kongress Saal, Munich, Germany (1972)

The "Inner Mounting Flame" is Mahavishnu Orchestra's first studio album, released in 1971.
A remastered version of the album, on CD, was released in 1998 by Sony Music Entertainment. It features a facsimile of the LP front cover, a new set of liner notes by Bob Belden, as well as many photographs of the band.
The Inner Mounting Flame consists solely of original compositions by John McLaughlin.
The track "You Know, You Know" was sampled in Massive Attack's "One Love", Mos Def's "Kalifornia", Black Sheep's single "Similak Child", David Sylvian's "I Surrender", Cecil Otter's "Rebel Yellow" and Blahzay Blahzay's "Intro" from Blah Blah Blah album.
The intro for "Noonward Race" was written for the full band and not just as a guitar-and-drums duet as heard on the album. During the recording of the piece, a long-standing tension between Rick Laird and Jerry Goodman boiled over into a full brawl, with the two of them knocking Jan Hammer and his keyboards over during the struggle. McLaughlin and Cobham continued to play at full volume during the entire altercation, and McLaughlin liked the effect so much he instructed Laird, Goodman, and Hammer to sit out while he comped behind Cobham's solo later in the song.



From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mahavishnu Orchestra was a jazz-rock fusion group, led by John McLaughlin, that debuted in 1971, dissolved in 1976 and reunited from 1984 to 1987.

The band's original lineup featured "Mahavishnu" John McLaughlin on acoustic and electric guitars, with members Billy Cobham on drums, Rick Laird on bass guitar, Jan Hammer on electric and acoustic piano and synthesizer, and Jerry Goodman on violin. This first incarnation of the ensemble was a multinational group: McLaughlin is from Yorkshire, England; Cobham from Panama; Hammer from Prague, Czechoslovakia; Goodman from Chicago, Illinois; and Laird from Dublin, Ireland. Jean-Luc Ponty was actually McLaughlin's first choice for violinist, but the idea was stalled by "immigration problems". Ponty would later play with McLaughlin on both Apocalypse and Visions of the Emerald Beyond. The group is best known for their albums The Inner Mounting Flame (1971) and Birds of Fire (1973).

This group was considered an important pioneer in the jazz fusion movement. McLaughlin and Cobham met while performing and recording with Miles Davis during the Bitches Brew sessions. McLaughlin was also influenced in his conception of the band by his studies with Indian guru Sri Chinmoy, who encouraged him to take the name "Mahavishnu" which means "Divine compassion, power and justice."

McLaughlin had particular ideas for the instrumentation of the group, in keeping with his highly original concept of genre-blending in composition. He particularly wanted a violinist as an integral contributor to its overall sound. As the group evolved, McLaughlin adopted what became his trademark: a double neck guitar (six-string and twelve-string) which allowed for a great degree of diversity in musical textures, and Hammer became one of the first to play a Mini Moog synthesizer in an ensemble, which enabled him to add more sounds and solo more freely, on the guitar and the violin.

Their musical style was an unprecedented blending of genres: they combined the high-volume electrified rock sound that had been pioneered by the Small Faces, the Who and later by Jimi Hendrix (who McLaughlin had jammed with on his initial arrival in New York as part of the Tony Williams Lifetime), complex rhythms in unusual time signatures that reflected McLaughlin's interest in Indian classical music as well as funk, and harmonic influence from European classical music. The group's early music was entirely instrumental; their later albums had songs which sometimes featured R&B or even gospel/hymn-styled vocals. In the aforementioned two albums, though, the group goes from an intense fusion of upbeat genres (a representative example of which is the song "Vital Transformation") to very serene, chamber music-like tunes, such as "A Lotus On Irish Streams," a composition for acoustic guitar, piano and violin, and "Thousand Island Park," which drops the violin and incorporates double bass; or from low-key to extremely busy in a single piece, such as "Open Country Joy."