The Creative Classroom by Mitchell Lopate, M.A.T. = Academic humanities advising-mentoring, tutoring, writing support: 30-plus years college & university and middle-elementary education in-class/online with a masters in education and a B.A. in psychology. (PS: it's fun.) Cross-curriculum humanities concepts, career counseling, MBA instruction, composition and research methods, and values, ethics, and writing. “Learn by example, succeed by effort." mitchLOP8@yahoo.com / 840-216-1014
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Advertising gets RE$ULT$ = SHOW ME THE MONEY!!
I teach advertising ideas in my graduate school business communications class because it shows critical thinking and creative concepts to GET THE JOB DONE. TO MAKE THE SALE. TO CLOSE THE DEAL. TO SIGN THE CONTRACT. TO MAKE MONEY.
This LOOKS funny (it is), but think of how the boardroom felt when the advertising team rolled it out for approval. (I'm sure: lots of laughs.) Guess who was laughing afterward: the advertising team when they got their bonus checks.
Look how the adjectives and verbs MAKE THE CUSTOMER WANT THIS.
Monday, May 25, 2026
Mahavisnu Orchestra - "Birds of Fire" complete album review
There once was a band led by a guitarist who studied Indian styles — and then incorporated his learning into a quintet that featured influences from Miles Davis. The Mahavishnu Orchestra, led by John McLaughlin, featured bassist Rick Laird, electric violinist Jerry Goodman, keyboardist Jan Hammer, and the ultimate timekeeper of detonation, Billy Cobham on Fibes (clear) drums. It was a thunderous encounter in concert, featuring the originality and possibilities of jazz fusion: an expansive, virtuosity-in-musical adventure. This is why and how I saw it. Note: I didn't listen to the album when I wrote this review. It was already embedded in memory.
(I argued for years with the late Michael Buffalo Smith about getting this into print--and he was as big a fan of the M.O. as I am! “Too vivid” was one way he described this essay. Damn right—this is a monster of a recording! I’ve virtually memorized every note. John McLaughlin and the band raised the stakes with his compositions. Bassist Rick Laird also gave me a personal thumbs-up after reading this.)
Let’s play a mini-version of ‘Six Degrees of Separation, Allman Brothers/Southern Style’ regarding this selection.
(1) Who did Jaimoe say that Berry, Duane, and he sounded like in Fame studios when they first met and decided to jam? The Mahavishnu Orchestra. (2) What guitarist (as well as Duane) was heavily inspired by John Coltrane and Miles Davis’s collaboration on Kind of Blue: John McLaughlin, leader of the M.O. (3) Who is one of Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell’s friends? Billy Cobham, drummer for the Orchestra. (4) What’s one of Warren Haynes’s personal favorite albums? Look closely: Birds of Fire. (5) Leo Kottke, who recorded Duane’s “Little Martha” (three times), toured with which group at one time? Of course—the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (6) Speaking of Billy Cobham, when he first heard the Allman tandem of Butch and Jaimoe in a typical battering-ram drum solo, he was convinced that it was one man overwhelming the kit, and even more impressed to hear it was a duo. I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity either to ponder whether Derek Trucks has had this in his CD player, would you?
This album, released in 1973, has enough energy and power to have been
recorded in the birth of a supernova. Only the inner sanctum of guitarists had
known a few years earlier of McLaughlin’s arrival from England as a living
legend, but the message quickly flew to the general public.
The
Orchestra featured McLaughlin’s double-neck blinding speed; Jan Hammer’s
keyboard outcries; Jerry Goodman’s electric violin playing both classical
themes and twin lead lines; Rick Laird’s trembling bass, and Billy Cobham’s
super-speed percussion and footwork. If you need any more help, think of the
legendary live Fillmore track of “Elizabeth Reed” and consider that as close
kin. Pure kinetic outbursts of notes and turbulent rhythms whip and rage on
these 10 cuts, but there are also a few brief glimpses of relative calm in the
eye of the hurricane.
It’s
perhaps appropriate that Cobham’s gong splashes and rolling percussion
alongside Goodman’s chanting violin herald the title song with an Asian
Indian-like mantra, as McLaughlin awakens with a piercing, rising flurry that
sounds like a peacock in a courtship frenzy. The ritual reply comes back from
Hammer’s synthesizer, and then it’s back to the guitar and violin as they weave
and intertwine like DNA strands. “Miles Beyond” (dedicated to the late
trumpeter) emerges slowly from the jazzy fog of electric piano and then watches
as Laird and Cobham raise the curtain for an opening statement by McLaughlin
and Goodman.
What
follows next requires headphones—as much as you want to believe it’s a muted
electric guitar, it’s really a beautiful, fascinating pizzicato on Goodman’s
violin, supported by more electric piano musings. The band then throws
itself into a brief summary, only to have McLaughlin and Cobham devastate
the landscape, sounding like a ferocious firefight from the worst days of
warfare, with machine gun-like guitar bullets flying in front of a bombardment
of cymbal-and-drum mortar explosions. The song ends as the opening phrase is
once again firmly planted in the ground like a waving banner.
Like a
scurrying swarm of ants in action (or New York City in rush hour), “Celestial
Terrestrial Commuters” features more electric guitar/violin duets and twin lead
lines, swept along by the pace of Cobham and Hammer like two
men with push brooms in a hyperactive frenzy to clean up after the crowd. It’s
followed by the brief (23-second) bit of electronic chatter of “Sapphire
Bullets of Pure Love.” The M.O. then offers one of the most delicate electric
pieces ever recorded, “Thousand Island Park,” with McLaughlin’s flamenco-like
acoustic performing a jazz ballet movement with Hammer’s piano as his partner,
praised by Laird’s bass.
With almost poetic resolution, “Hope” builds in what can best be
considered grandeur, strengthened by Cobham’s percussion and Laird’s upright
bowed bass, capturing some of the rich arrangement ideas that George Martin
used so effectively with the Beatles on albums like Magical Mystery Tour’s
“I am the Walrus.”
Track seven, “One Word,” was born in the deep realms of space in a
galaxy that contains life-forms unlike any found on Earth. Beginning with
Cobham’s skintight inside-out snare solo, the band frantically careens through
the very narrowest of channels like a bobsled race without brakes. They
miraculously arrive unharmed and safe with the rescue effort of Laird’s solo,
only to mutter and fuss behind his melodic tumbling notes.
However,
it’s too easy to be safe, and in a three-way argument of “my opinion, and
yours-be-damned,” McLaughlin, Hammer, and Goodman take turns venting their
thoughts and gestures like a three-headed alien being with dramatic, flamboyant
phrases. The climax of the tension is reached as each man/creature tries
to shout down his colleague with overlapping statements that sound like a
marriage counselor’s nightmare day in the office, and Cobham steps up to clear
the brawl. A muscular drum solo follows as he rolls effortlessly back and forth
on his tom-toms, and the double bass drum pedals thump like a dangerous blood
pressure reading. A series of staccato notes signals that the band is ready to
snap its chains again and breaks into a final exhausting sort of cosmic orgasm.
Something is surely needed to calm down the fury, and it’s time to seek
“Sanctuary,” a song that must be a eulogy for the casualties of all this
turmoil. Hammer’s grief-stricken synthesizer solo weeps behind the wails of
dual violin-guitar lead, and there appears to be no light at the end of the
tunnel. However, this isn’t the case, as “Open Country Joy” (a song that Kottke did on Dreams and All That Stuff and the newly-reissued 1971-1976: Did You Hear
Me?) awakens like the first warm day of spring. Gliding violin and
12-string guitar preface the false ending, which bursts into full bloom behind
McLaughlin’s electric warbling, Hammer’s return calls, and Goodman’s ecstatic
freedom. Cobham unleashes a summer shower while the sun shines, then pulsates
away, switching to brushes while the others frolic and dance.
All
these adrenaline rushes have to find the time to regenerate, and “Resolution”
closes out as the band redoubles its intention and vigor with a “you haven’t
seen the last of me” conviction that is almost patriotic in its foundation. If
anything is needed, it’s a towel and a shower, as these five musical massage
therapists have just finished pummeling the daylights out of your mental
muscles.
Do
not, under any circumstances, give this CD to anyone who is under a doctor’s
supervision and requiring bed rest. On the other hand, if you need to paint the
entire house in one day (or build one) and don’t mind doing the job yourself,
the Mahavishnu Orchestra will gladly haul any gear or heavy construction
material you need with the pure power of sound at its best—and it could move a
mountain. I’ll bet they don’t require a ladder, either, because they know your
speakers will use anti-gravity to get the job done. Crank it up and watch!