THE LOST TRIDENT SESSIONS

With the music as intense as it was and with five incredible talented and extraordinary musicians combined together to create the passion and complexity in the music they created something had to give. And so in the summer of 1973 the awesome power that was the McLaughlin/Cobham/Laird/Hammer/Goodman inspired Mahavishnu Orchestra erupted, fragmented and ultimately broke up. McLaughlin regrouped under the Mahavishnu Orchestra name but even he must have known that there was no way that anyone one else combined under that moniker could reach the tidal wave of intensity that was the original Mahavishnu Orchestra. And while the new 'Vishnu carried on under different guises this, what would have been the third MO release proper, lay hidden away in vault in a CBS studio somewhere for almost twenty five years, which sounds almost unbelievable and the stuff that dreams are made of.

Again it sees Mahavishnu Orchestra progressing further and although the album has it critics it showed how far they could go musically and for me the album goes well beyond the boundaries or perhaps realms of fusion and the music is almost completely new to my ears and like the Hubble Telescope reaching out into space for new discoveries, so too this album saw the 'Vishnu expanding their horizons and stretching the limits to the maximum and The Lost Trident Sessions is the music of a dream world. It has to be acknowledged that these five guys put out three albums (including this one) and to go this far in the space of a couple of years is simply phenomenal, and though the album is slightly uneven and rather unfinished as the band never fully developed the music it is a testimony of skill and emotional, raw anger juxtaposed together in the five separate beings combining to form one and exploding in the process. This album should not be under estimated.