John McLaughlin - Industrial Zen (2006) / Jazz-Rock, Fusion

The ever peripatetic and ever restless John McLaughlin returns again to the electric jazz field that he once commanded in the early '70s, while never quite landing on the same spot where he left off. A few of the familiar components are still whirring away — the dizzyingly fast and jagged unison themes; the furious interplay with his teammates, whose personnel change on every track. But the landscape has changed again: McLaughlin immerses himself deeply into the high-tech digital scenery, programming loops and backdrops (the mood piece "New Blues Old Bruise" is merely a sleeker impression of what Pink Floyd was doing more than three decades before). Those voices you hear on a few tracks are, of course, not real; they're sampled chorus effects as played through a controller of some sort (which anyone can do at home on a Yamaha keyboard these days). Memories of Shakti — McLaughlin's sporadically recurring Indian experiment — are hinted at but not recalled in toto as tabla master Zakir Hussain is called upon repeatedly, working himself into a frenzy on the 12-and-a-half-minute tone poem "Dear Dalai Lama." Saxophonist Bill Evans arrives from the 1980s version of Mahavishnu; he knows his way around the McLaughlin mazes of notes as well as anyone, and on the closing passage of "Just So Only More So," he and McLaughlin carry on a touching, conversational dialogue on their instruments. Hadrien Feraud pays effusive, voluble tribute to Jaco Pastorius, not only on the obvious title "For Jaco," but also on "Senor C.S." While Industrial Zen is a reminder to all that McLaughlin remains a formidable electric player in his sixties, the only track that really sticks in the memory is the last, "Mother Nature," with its electronic revolving ostinato and Shankar Mahadevan's keening vocal. Industrial Zen, indeed.