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JAZZ ON SUNDAY: McLAUGHLIN-SANTANA SESSIONS 1973

January 22, 2023 – 6:20 am

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McLAUGHLIN-SANTANA
Love Devotion Surrender Sessions [no label, 2CD]
Unknown studio (supposedly in California); 1973. Good to fairly good soundboard.

Thanks to jswetch for sharing the tracks at Dime.

jswetch noted:

I purchased this many years ago in a record store (remember them?) in New York’s East Village. It’s supposed to be outtakes from the sessions that produced the LDS album, and indeed there are different versions and works in progress from that project here. The version of A Love Supreme on this was virtually identical to the one on the official release, so I didn’t include that for the sake of not having this banned.

What you’ll hear doesn’t sound pristine - as in lovingly curated “mixed and mastered re-release extras”, but it is pretty good quality, given the time period that this emerged from. My guess is that this was dubbed a couple of times from the original studio tapes. There’s very little documentation on the boot case, so I guessed at the personnel as being the same people that were on the official release.

Some of these songs also appeared on the Santana Welcome album of the same time period (Mantra was a bonus on a few remaster versions of the Welcome CD). It’s difficult to know if these tracks were really being considered for LDS, or if the original bootlegger had access to some of the Welcome outtakes too. I’d guess that the Samba de Sausalito tracks and Flame Sky are from the Welcome sessions, so that would remove Larry Young, Jan Hammer, and Don Alias from playing on them. That would then mean adding in Tom Coster and Richard Kermode on keys, along with Chepito Arias on percussion for those tracks.

The Samba tracks are actually parts of one lengthy run through of that song. You’ll hear studio voices giving ideas and basically learning the tune. There’s no guitar on the track as it appears on the Welcome album, so whether this is Santana or McLaughlin playing the guitar heard here is up in the air. There’s not enough distinctive guitar to really make that determination. That’s also true of tracks 9-13. These are acoustic tracks, and it’s hard to tell if there’s more than one guitar or if that guitar is McLaughlin or Santana. Each, of course, is a very distinctive player who is usually pretty easy to identify, but that is not the case on these tracks.

Hope this proves to be an interesting listen. Remarkable to think that there was a time almost 50 years ago when a project like this would have been awarded a Gold Record for sales, which the original Love Devotion Surrender did actually receive.

Please support all of these great artists (many of whom are still with us) by purchasing their commercially released music and by going to see them live.

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Lineage:
Liberated bootleg CD > EAC disc extraction > TLH WAV to Flac conversion >TLH torrent creation

Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (320 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.

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Disc 1
Track 101. The Life Divine Jam 13:59
102. A Love Supreme - omitted (official release?)
Track 103. Naima 3:11
Track 104. The Life Divine 1 10:34
Track 105. The Life Divine 2 10:24
Track 106. Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord 13:40
52 mins

Disc 2
Track 201. Mantra 8:51
Track 202. Flame Sky 11:41
Track 203. Untitled fragment 1 1:32
Track 204. Untitled Fragment 2 1:58
Track 205. Acoustic Idea 1 4:21
Track 206. Acoustic Idea 2 3:37
Track 207. Acoustic Idea 3 5:10
Track 208. Samba de Sausalito 1 5:18
Track 209. Samba de Sausalito 2 3:23
Track 210. Samba de Sausalito 3 5:46
Track 211. Samba de Sausalito 4 5:51
58 mins

Performers:
John Mclaughlin - guitars
Carlos Santana - guitars
Doug Rauch - bass
Larry Young - organ
Armando Peraza - congas
Billy Cobham - drums
Jan Hammer - drums
Mike Shrieve - drums
Don Alias - drums

   Click here to order Love Devotion Surrender.