THE MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA WITH JOHN MCLAUGHLIN The Inner Mounting Flame (Speakers Corner)

The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s 1971 debut sounds kind of like a raggedy, prog rock version of contemporaneous Miles Davis (of whose fusion finishing school guitarist McLaughlin was a graduate). Jerry Goodman, formerly of The Flock, plays keening, smoky electric violin, a pretty good timbral foil for McLaughlin’s scorching, acrid guitar tones, and helps distance it from the work of other fusion bands. It’s a mess, admittedly, but a glorious, jet-propelled one. On the one hand, it anticipates Jeff Beck’s much tamer version of this music on his 1975 album “Blow By Blow”; on the other, it shows up Frank Zappa’s scripted jam sessions as starched and regimented, sounding like a tape of “Hot Rats” that’s been sliced into pieces, thrown in the air and spliced back together in a random order, William Burroughs cut up-style.

At times, “The Inner Mounting Flame” is an absolutely blistering listen: “The Noonward Race” and “Vital Transformation”, for example, are huge, craggy melodic cliff faces, awesome when playing if barely memorable afterwards. “A Lotus On Irish Streams” provides a few minutes of relative relaxation, but even here the dialogue between guitar, violin and Jan Hammer’s piano is still dazzling in its intricacy. If all this suggests an album composed entirely of elitist instrumental grandstanding, “You Know You Know”, sampled by Massive Attack and Mos Def, proves otherwise. It sounds purpose built to soundtrack a quiet, tense scene in a blaxploitation film, Billy Cobham’s drumming bordering on sinister.

Speakers Corner’s lovely 180 gram vinyl reissue appears to be closely modelled on the original US pressing; it does as good a job as could be expected with this thick, churning sonic broth.

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