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From The Desk Of Christopher O’Riley: John McLaughlin’s “A Lotus On Irish Streams”

Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

O’Riley: My collaboration with cellist Matt Haimovitz on double-album CD set Shuffle.Play.Listen and its eponymous and ongoing concert tour (this and next month find us together in Canada and the U.S.) was a natural meeting of two musical paths. Matt’s been known to take classical works, like Bach’s cello suites, to unlikely venues such as the old CBGB and other non-classical venues, juxtaposed with my introducing classical concert halls with my own takes on Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Nirvana, et al. In exploring our mutual musical loves, the first name to spontaneously spring up was John McLaughlin. Matt actually was joined by John on his cello-ensemble, Grammy-nominated Meeting Of The Spirits. So, for our first concert, I meticulously transcribed McLaughlin’s hyper-virtuosic guitar solo from his Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “The Dance Of Maya” from The Inner Mounting Flame and our very first concert together, a year ago in Billings, Mont., featured it as the show closer to an intrepid and enthusiastic crowd there at the Alberta Bair Theater.

“A Lotus On Irish Streams” was another natural choice for us, as it was a relaxed and inspiring improvisational environment (one can find numerous live performances of great variety and beauty by John, Mahavishnu keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Grossman) for novices like the classically trained Matt and me. Nice to have our session video of same as this was the one-take track on Shuffle.Play.Listen.

Video after the jump.