INNER WORLDS

Much of the music here sounds far more like the easy listening soul/R&B that would become Narada Michael Walden's signature over the next decade (or more); the rest sounds more like what has become the bastardization of Jazz-Rock Fusion's Third Wave: great, enthusiastic musicianship that is trying to breathe life into an already-tired and self- repeating field of formulaic replicant songs while at the same time experimenting with the music industry's overwhelming deluge of new equipment.

Between November 3, 1971 (when The Inner Mounting Flame was unleashed upon a sleeping, unprepared world) and the megaton release of Return to Forever's 1976 masterpiece Romantic Warrior), Jazz-Rock Fusion had peaked. The rest is just downhill momentum (and the inevitable stumble, fall, and crash toward the bottom). While this album was technically released in January of 1976, recorded long before RTF's crowning achievement, it shows John (and newcomer keyboard player Stu Goldberg) exploring the very latest of technological inventions: here synth guitars as well as many special effects combinations he had not yet explored, so, yes, he was still cutting edge envelope-pushing; it's just that he was pushing the envelope in a direction that really ruffled feathers--the feathers of not only his listening audience (has the human ear/brain ever been ready for the information that the electronic, computer, and digital eras have dumped onto us?) but the jazz and jazz-fusion crowd in particular. He would have been safer had he gone full-Santana with an all Latin Jazz-Rock album like the album opener, "All in the Family," or all Smooth Jazz like "Gita," or total Yacht Rock (like "In My Life" and "The Way of the Pilgrim") than the robot funk of "Miles Out" and "Inner Worlds Part 1" or the Scottish Jon Anderson interlude of "Morning Calls" or "Lotus Feet." In my opinion, the only song on this album worthy of carrying the "Mahavishnu" name is the album's opener; the rest are too Narada Michael Waldenized.

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