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John McLaughlin and the Electric Storm: The Guitarist Who Supercharged Bitches Brew

Writer's picture: Joshua QuddusJoshua Quddus

In the pantheon of jazz fusion, few moments loom larger than the creation of Bitches Brew. Released in April 1970, the album—Miles Davis’s sprawling, electrified opus—was a seismic shift in the language of jazz. With its avant-garde structures, hypnotic grooves, and kaleidoscopic textures, Bitches Brew laid the groundwork for an entirely new genre. At the heart of its sonic revolution was a young British guitarist who had yet to release a solo album: John McLaughlin.

McLaughlin, then 27, had arrived in New York only months before the Bitches Brew sessions, summoned by Tony Williams to join his high-octane trio, Lifetime. When Miles Davis heard him play, he was immediately intrigued. “John McLaughlin is one of the best guitar players alive,” Davis later wrote in his autobiography. “Man, he could play that thing.”

McLaughlin’s role in Bitches Brew was subtle yet profound. His electric guitar, run through a lightly distorted amplifier, added a layer of searing tension to the album’s dense, multi-rhythmic core. While jazz guitarists of the time largely adhered to the clean tones of Wes Montgomery or Jim Hall, McLaughlin’s playing—angular, aggressive, and steeped in blues and Indian classical influences—helped push Bitches Brew into the realm of pure experimentation.

One of his most striking contributions comes on “Pharaoh’s Dance,” where his fractured, blues-inflected phrases dart in and out of the murky, reverberating soundscape. On the album’s title track, his comping is almost subliminal—an eerie presence lurking beneath Davis’s piercing trumpet and Wayne Shorter’s serpentine saxophone. Yet, on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” McLaughlin emerges in full force, answering Davis’s muted cries with sharp, percussive bursts of guitar, foreshadowing the fiery virtuosity that would define his later work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

McLaughlin’s presence on Bitches Brew also symbolized something greater: the inevitable fusion of rock’s raw energy with jazz’s improvisational daring. While Davis had already begun incorporating electric instruments on In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew represented a full embrace of amplification, distortion, and the pulse of a new era. Alongside keyboardists Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea, and bassist Dave Holland, McLaughlin was part of a cohort of European musicians who helped shape Davis’s vision of jazz as a borderless, globally infused sound.

In the wake of Bitches Brew, McLaughlin would go on to become one of fusion’s most revered figures. His work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s crystallized many of the ideas that Davis had first explored—unrelenting rhythmic complexity, modal harmonies, and a relentless pursuit of technical innovation. And while Bitches Brew was very much Miles Davis’s brainchild, McLaughlin’s incendiary playing remains an indelible part of its mythology.

More than 50 years later, McLaughlin’s presence on Bitches Brew still feels like a bolt of lightning captured on tape. It was a harbinger of what was to come—not just for him, but for an entire generation of musicians who saw in Davis’s electric experiments a new way forward. And for McLaughlin, it was the beginning of a career spent straddling the divide between the spiritual and the revolutionary, the cerebral and the visceral, forever chasing the sound of the future.


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