To the One

Overview

To the One was inspired by the 1965 John Coltrane album A Love Supreme. The liner notes were written by McLaughlin and detail how he was influenced by A Love Supreme both musically and spiritually.

The music came to McLaughlin over a five-week period in the summer of 2009. McLaughlin previously honoured the memory of Coltrane on his 1973 collaboration with Carlos Santana, Love Devotion Surrender.

The album was nominated for the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album but lost to the Stanley Clarke album The Stanley Clarke Band. The other nominees were Never Can Say Goodbye by Joey DeFrancesco, Now Is the Time by Jeff Lorber, and Backatown by Trombone Shorty.

The band

McLaughlin has been playing with this group of musicians live since 2007 but this is their first release of new material. In addition to his keyboard playing throughout the album, Gary Husband also plays drums on two tracks, "Recovery" and "To the One". He also has a piano solo on the track "Special Beings". Bassist Etienne Mbappé, who was born Cameroon and raised in Paris, replaced original 4th Dimension Bassist Hadrien Feraud when he broke his hand in 2009, has a solo on the track "Discovery". Mark Mondesir plays drums on every track except "Recovery" and "To the One". Bandleader and composer, John McLaughlin, of course, provides all of the guitar work and even plays a guitar synth on "Lost and Found" and "To the One".

Reception

Mike Greenblatt called To the One "very heady, complicated, meandering, spiritual, bass-centric yet trebly and deeply satisfying" in The Aquarian Weekly. Thom Jurek of Allmusic called the album an "inspired milestone for McLaughlin and a fine recorded introduction to one of the more exciting electric jazz groups in the 4th Dimension". Stuart Nicholson of Jazzwise referred to the album as "an odyssey through McLaughlin's spiritual awakening and the meaning it has had in his music". John Fordham of The Guardian wrote that the album is a "tight 40-minute document [that] hums with a collaborative energy".

John Bungey of The Times was more mixed in his review writing "a strong group performance but a few more memorable themes amid the bustle might have added to the spiritual uplift". Randy Ray wrote on Jambands.com that McLaughlin "finds a way to pull his listeners under the surface, and into that fourth dimensional point of view".

John Kelman in All About Jazz wrote that there is "no shortage of high octane playing here" and that it is "McLaughlin's most exhilarating work and group since his Heart of Things band in the late 1990s" and closed by saying that the album is "quite simply, McLaughlin's best album in well over a decade". Ian Patterson in All About Jazz wrote that "Simply listening to his improvisations throughout the six originals leaves no doubt that he is in inspired creative form." Robert Bush, also in All About Jazz, called To the One the "most consistently engaging disc in years" and that "McLaughlin's chops have never been better".

Track listing

All tracks written by John McLaughlin

1. "Discovery" 6:19
2. "Special Beings" 8:38
3. "The Fine Line" 7:43
4. "Lost and Found" 4:26
5. "Recovery" 6:21
6. "To the One" 6:34

Personnel