Sonic Upgrade for a Firebreathing 1973 Concert

Mahavishnu Live at Yale University

At long last there’s a slightly-more-official release of Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Yale concert in October 1973. You might have seen it as a bootleg with some version of this cover photo — and if you did, you only heard the rough outlines.

This features the early lineup — Billy Cobham (drums), Jerry Goodman (violin), Jan Hammer (keyboards), Rick Laird (bass), John McLaughlin (guitar) — and documents a moment on the group’s extended tour for its second album, Birds Of Fire.

The band was onstage for an hour and a half and played five tunes, including the then-unreleased “Trilogy,” which came out a few months later on the live Between Nothingness & Eternity. The razor-sharp sonics of this version provide an extreme close-up version of the well-established Mahavishnu virtuosity, and more importantly a detailed rendering of the group’s interplay-forward narrative genius: This is instrumental music that tells stories through skillfully managed contrasts between light and dark, soft and loud, density and nothingness. It would be plenty impressive if they executed this music the same way nightly. But of course they didn’t: These peaks and valleys are, at root, exploratory.