Premiere – John McLaughlin’s ‘Marbles’ remixed by Stefan Goldmann
You’ll lose your ‘Marbles’ when you hear it
Wow. Well, this is special.
Today, we’re graced by the presence of true greatness on Juno Daily. We can’t overstate the contribution John McLaughlin (pictured, above) has made to music, from his work on monumental albums like Bitches Brew, Live-Evil and In A Silent Way with Miles Davis to numerous solo albums and his equally influential Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Stefan Goldmann’s Macro label has pulled off a real coup and licensed the classic track ‘Marbles’ – taken from the Doncaster-born guitarist’s 1970 album Devotion – and pressed it onto 12″ together with a reworking by Goldmann himself, that joins the dots from the original’s proto-techno stromp through its Moroder-esque bassline and on, to today’s dancefloor sensibilities. It’s a true corker.
That’s why we’re delighted to say we can bring it to you right now, ahead of the vinyl’s release on March 7. What’s more, Goldmann has penned a few highly incisive paragraphs on precisely why he loves the original so much and how he went about creating his version. It’s well worth a read.
Hear the track on YouTube:
or Soundcloud:
and preview the 12″ on the Juno Player:
Stefan Goldmann (pictured below) told us: “John McLaughlin’s ‘Marbles’ has been a personal favourite since I was 16 or so. Originally, I bought the Devotion album on cassette. It was the first ‘electric jazz’ album I owned, before Bitches Brew even. I discovered so much from this vantage point: electric Miles, Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Mahavishnu, Jaco… However, initially it was totally not what I expected. There’s nothing ‘jazz’ about it, really. Just raw energy, something like the album Jimi Hendrix would have possibly recorded if he had lived another year. How the different players work together is pure magic. Buddy Miles on drums, Billy Rich on bass, Larry Young on organ. Absolutely mind-bending. Particularly ‘Marbles’ is the apex of the album. It has the best bassline of the decade, like ‘Billie Jean’ was the bassline of the 1980s. Hence I’ve wanted to do a version of this for twenty years, but only now found an angle to handle the bassline, and something to bounce off of it too.
“At the core of it there’s a bassline crafted with the Macbeth Micromac synthesizer. This is a monophonic analogue synth which has three oscillators and deep modulation capabilities – just what it took to make it raw and energetic. It has a bit of a staccato feel too, like a hint of Donna Summer. The counterweight to this is a set of chords and pads that were done with the speech synthesis function of the Waldorf Quantum synthesizer. It sounds a bit like a vocoder, but isn’t. Remember the original was recorded in 1970s, and none of this was a thing yet then: vocoder, sequencer bass, drum machines… ‘Marbles’ foreshadows so much of what was to arrive within the decade, and I wanted to pick up on most aspects of it. In the original Buddy Miles plays this proto-disco beat, the bassline is what would become classic Moroder territory, and Larry Young does sounds and textures with a Hammond organ that one would think would require a wall of a synthesizer. And this is just one of multiple dimensions along which this was easily a decade ahead of everybody else. It is basically the entire aesthetic of post punk, fully evolved, years before punk. And I didn’t even mention about the guitar playing yet.
“Without a question, this is a one-of-a-kind milestone. It has been reissued many times, again and again since the early 1980s. So musicians tend to know this one inside out. It is just that the wider public still isn’t aware of just how important – and great and enjoyable – this record is. The way dance music works today, it is important in yet another way, again. We know about the lineage of Motown to Kraftwerk to Detroit and Chicago. But I’d argue that it was Miles Davis who invented the ‘track’ form to begin with, and the way to blend tracks seamlessly in continuous sets – which we all use and do today. McLaughlin was there at the absolute key moments: In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, On The Corner… Devotion and ‘Marbles’ are another facet of this development and possibly the most danceable, apart from some of the 1970s Herbie Hancock stuff which came out of the same mold, but a year or two later.”