Carlos Santana / Bill Laswell, Divine Light

Bill Laswell has chosen to remix these recordings undoubtedly because they had an influence on him just as the excellent Miles Davis Pangea recordings did. So he knew going into it that he had some incredible material to work with. The CD artwork is consistently high as are most of Laswell's recent productions. He brings this seminal recording up-to-date in a manner that really makes it shine. I may be biased because I enjoy listening to anything BIll Laswell plays on or produces. This is a really fine recording, if you are into world, meditative, Santana, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Shakti, Shankar, etc. If you prefer more pop or traditional swing jazz it may not be locked into your favorite genre. But if you like all styles of music and enjoy more meditative, wide-open electric improvisational fare, this may be the ticket, and if you don't have an example of either Santana, McLaughlin, or Laswell, this could be an interesting introduction to their music, even though it is not necessarily the same as the rest of any of these artists' music.

The prolific Bill Laswell has been a part of New York's music scene since moving there and forming jazz-funk-punk group Material in 1979. He has appeared either as performer or studio technician on hundreds of albums, as diverse as works by Laurie Anderson, Bootsy Collins, Mot rhead and the magnificent Fela Kuti. His breakthrough came with production of Herbie Hancock's Future Shock in 1983. A particularly interesting project is with Tabla Beat Science, his collaboration with percussionists Trilok Gurtu, Zakir Hussain and Talvin Singh.

1997 saw Laswell reworking Miles Davis' electric music for Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974, followed swiftly by Panthalassa: The Remixes in 1999. If you were left wondering what Laswell had actually achieved with Panthalassa, then Divine Light may reinstate your faith in the remixing industry.

For Divine Light, Laswell has turned his attention to two classic 70's spiritual albums, named as solo projects for Carlos Santana, Love Devotion Surrender (1973) with John McLaughlin and Illuminations (1974) with Alice Coltrane. Laswell selected Illuminations as his favorite Santana album and popular for club chill-out rooms in NYC. whilst Love, Devotion, Surrender was considered only later.

Let's peel back the layers on this CD. Firstly the packaging is exceptional for imagery and design, but there is frustratingly little about the Laswell remix process and the original sessions - we know there's a lot more on the original tapes because someone has bootlegged the Love, Devotion, Surrender Sessions. I'm not sure whether I've got the super deluxe edition in front of me, but the first 75,000 copies will come as a 10 panel fold out digipak, with artwork by renowned Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo, who is the artist for Santana's Lotus, which explains why Divine Light looks quite similar. To establish the spiritual context, new liner notes include quotes from the writings of John Coltrane, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the Dalai Lama. Soon to the music, but first a few thoughts on spirituality in music.

The roots of music are more exposed in India than anywhere else (Sachs, 1943). Early Sanskrit sources portray music as the center of all religious rites, court ceremonials, and private entertainments (Ibid.). The Indian culture is deeply rooted in music, and they believed that the gods they worshipped were ardent musicians (Ibid.). The Vedic cantillation was founded in India as a specific type of religious music. The Veda is the whole of the pre-Buddhist religious wisdom collected in four books: Rig-Veda, the Veda of verses; Sama-Veda, the Veda of melodies; and two others, Yajur-Veda and Atharva-Veda (Ibid.) ... the Sama-Veda is divided into seven tones where "the gods live on the highest note [and] man on the first of the following." (Ibid.). This is why the Hindus would later refer to the diatonic scale as one note plus six. (Ibid.) Thus we can derive that Indian music was closely related to its culture and an integral part of the religious service.

It is not surprising therefore that great musicians find Indian culture harmonious with their own lives. The names Mahavishnu ("divine compassion, power, and justice") and Devadip ("the eye, the lamp of the light of God") were given to John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana by their guru Sri Chinmoy. Turiya Aparana Satchidananda (Turiya is the terminal transcendental level of nirvanic and super-consciousness) was given to Alice Coltrane by her guru Swami Satchidananda. McLaughlin entered Chinmoy's fellowship before Santana as a natural extension of his interests in Indian culture and eastern religious beliefs stemming from playing with Graham Bond.

The raga is perhaps the most difficult form of Indian music to comprehend. Raga means "color" or "passion" and denotes a pattern of melody with a well-defined mood and a modal scale in which every note has its individual place as the starter, the predominant, the center, and the final. (Sachs, 1943) The raga also requires a drone, or pedal tone to emphasize the predominant. The ragas were believed to have cosmic connotations and to contain "secret energies that worked on man and nature." (Ibid.). The Indians used ragas to arouse one of the nine sentiments: love, tenderness, humor, heroism, terror, anger, disgust, surprise, and tranquility. (Ibid.). This is one of the first known references to the theory of the psychological effects of music, and musicologists would later consult the ancient Indian document of Ramayana to support their theories of the therapeutic value of music in the healing process. (Alvin 1966). Today spiritually conscious musicians such as Ravi Shankar, John McLaughlin, and Carlos Santana use the raga in their concert performances to "broaden the understanding" of their audiences. (Gill 1995) This is a testament to the spiritual power of the raga, that it is still being performed today in concerts (read: ceremonies) by musicians.

From the active role that John McLaughlin took to pursue his interests (travelling to India, studying Vina, forming Shakti, etc.) that it is probably an injustice to have credited Love Devotion Surrender primarily to Carlos Santana. If one assumes that this was an administrative error, simply reflecting Laswell's bias, and perhaps attempting to cash in on the success of Supernatural, then given the topicality of Santana's latest acclaim, it is not surprising that the official press would echo this falsity. Sadly, it also implies that McLaughlin and his management had no input into the process. Love Devotion Surrender undoubtedly reflects more the musical bent of ex-Lifetime, India-inspired Mahavishnu John McLaughlin at that time. Indeed Carlos Santana's licks on the Illuminations material are amongst the most eastern he ever got (compare them against his next "solo" venture, the funky Oneness, Silver Dreams, Golden Reality from 1979).

The skill of Laswell's remixing is self-evident. Taking the master tapes, he has reintroduced clips that were originally edited out of the final recording including Jules Broussard's flute and has brought a lot of the percussion forward including Phil Ford's tabla. The guitar work is modified only slightly, cuts in track time being the major impact. A Love Supreme uses only a few minutes of the extensive trade-offs of the original whilst The Life Divine uses McLaughlin's 12-string track and cuts all but the last few bars of his solo. Thankfully we have lost Tom Coster's siren-like motif from Angel Of Air / Angel Of Water, the tedium of which can only be forgiven because of the unchartered territory through which the music was journeying, although Jan Hammer was doing something far more exciting in the Mahavishnu Orchestra's Birds of Fire sessions at about the same time, and the great Larry Young never failed to amaze. Infact, one feature to benefit most from the remastering is the clarity of Larry Young's Coltranesque sheets of sound, which has to be good thing for us all.

The re-sequenced tracks are tied together with a tamboura drone that does an adequate job of providing a smooth enough ride to create the sensation of listening to an original album rather than a compilation. However, the restructuring of this "new" album works in the main because of the clever mixing and ephereal sonic tapestry on Illuminations. It doesn't matter so much that Love, Devotion, Surrender has been chopped up, but Illuminations was more of a journey in sound and spirit. Some of the voyager feeling has been lost. Sometimes the post-production grates, for example an echo put on the voices in A Love Supreme has resulted in the mantra ending up in a sonic desert. With singing that bad, you need instruments in behind it! The segue from Angel Of Sunlight onto that beautiful gentle end to Naima sounds like a parochial DJ getting the mix wrong. A little patience here would have made a much greater impact without ruining the acoustic magic.

Laswell is currently producing an Ethiopian pop record featuring Wayne Shorter and Pharaoh Sanders and planning a Herbie Hancock remix project along with a future Santana remix of Welcome and Caravanserai. There were also rumours that he wanted to get hold of the tapes of Lifetime's Emergency and Turn It Over.

Of Divine Light, the release as a package of cover art and music is incredible. There are extensive improvements to the original mix on the selected tracks, with some instruments, particularly acoustic ones (percussion, harp, etc.) becoming clearer and the overall feel a lot funkier with emphasised bass and organ. That we should see re-release of this type of spiritual music at all is wonderful, what could have been achieved by remixing the entire albums beggars belief. But Divine Light is not the original albums, it is a reconstruction and therefore should be approached as such. The product has, in one way or another, ended up more Santana orientated and this is reflected throughout. However, any self-respecting fan of the original classic albums, Indojazz, jazz-fusion, Carlos Santana or John McLaughlin needs to own a copy of Divine Light.

References:

Alvin, Juliette. Music Therapy. New York: Humanities Press, Inc. 1966

Gill, Chris, and James Rotondi, and Jas Obrecht. "Within You, Without You." Guitar Player May 1995: 49+.

Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World East and West. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1943

Internet Sources:

MTV.COM

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Rolling Stone

Legacy Recordings

Newsweek Web

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