On today’s date in 1971, Inner Mounting Flame by The Mahavishnu Orchestra was released. If there was any jazz album in the record collection of a rock music enthusiast in the early 1970s, it was this one. There were earlier albums like Miles’ Bitches Brew that scratched the surface of jazz-rock fusion, but Inner Mounting Flame brought the genre into the consciousness of the masses. It was Inner Mounting Flame that influenced Chick Corea to take Return to Forever into the jazz-rock fusion realm, Herbie Hancock to form Headhunters, and Jeff Beck to enter his Blow by Blow era. It was a powerhouse as all albums are that start an entire movement. IMF was the product of four of the best musicians alive in 1971. John McLaughlin played more chords in one song than most bands played in a lifetime, and faster solos than anyone at the time. Billy Cobham was a beast on the drums and became the template for power drummers in jazz thereafter. Jan Hammer and Jerry Goodman were both trained at the prestigious Berklee School of Music and Goodman’s only peer on fusion violin at the time was Jean-Luc Ponty (who would wind up replacing Goodman in McLaughlin’s band). The only weak link, to me, was Rick Laird. Shame the great Tony Levin wasn’t home when McLaughlin called to recruit him. Instead, Tony’s mother answered and later told her son, “Someone from Murray Vishnoo and his orchestra called.” Tony wasn’t interested in orchestral work so he never returned the call. I have a feeling that John McLaughlin listened to what Robert Fripp put together on In the Court of the Crimson King, which also featured guitar gymnastics fueled by nuclear fusion juxtaposed with sublimely calm, almost classical, pieces both within and between songs. I also have a feeling that Fripp then listened to John’s direction on Flame and patterned the album Red and its extremely dark passages contrasted with extremely light passages on John’s blueprint. There really isn’t any album I have heard with tastier virtuoso controlled insanity than Inner Mounting Flame or Red. Flame has the added benefit of being a first album from McLaughlin and his Orchestra with the concomitant energy and joy of young visionary men who find contemporaries equally gifted and, in so doing, become acutely aware of their combined unlimited potential. Together, they created an album filled with beautiful, zen-like songs and violent, speeding to the finish line songs. It is not music for everyone but, for jazz musicians and for rock musicians, it opened up an entirely new world of possibilities. Not many albums have done that ever again.