Only Englishmen can grin as sweetly as John McLaughlin is grinning on the front and back covers of Love Devotion Surrender. His grin is guileless and at the same time almost prissy. Above all, it is a grin of satisfaction. Carlos Santana is grimacing. Not from pain or from confusion: His grimace suggests that he is reaching. Sri Chinmoy's blissful, absent countenance suggests that he is there, wherever that is.

The progression of McLaughlin's music, from Devotion through Birds Of Fire, has been toward certainty. Unfortunately, this inner peace has involved an increasing reliance on musical formulas. As Mahavishnu reaches bliss his tunes begin to sound alike. To paraphrase a Zen koan: The Perfect Way knows no difficulties in that it refuses to make choices.

Carlos Santana is still growing and changing. Caravanserai reached for subtlety and variety of expression. It didn't always work, but it always tried. It signaled a new involvement for Carlos, who had evidently been listening carefully to people like Pharoah Sanders and Lonnie Liston Smith and the late John Coltrane for the first time. Into the picture came Mahavishnu and his Guru, who seem to have a few answers. The resulting album captures an important transitional point in the careers of both musicians.

The influence of Coltrane dominates Love Devotion Surrender as it has dominated no other rock album. And this music is rock; loud and insistent, it depends on monochord drones and simple modes for its structure and on sheer screaming force for much of its effect. The first two tunes are 'Trane's. "A Love Supreme" gets a high-energy treatment. After an out-of-tempo introduction, organist Khalid Yasin (Larry Young) contributes a beautiful, delicately shaded theme statement, followed by a guitar dialogue which heats up rapidly. As the guitarists (Carlos mostly on the left channel and John on the right, though some phasing is employed) drop out, they take up Coltrane's original vocal chant and Khalid plays some shimmering washes over it.

Coltrane's "Naima" is perhaps his most beautiful composition, and the guitarists wisely play it straight in a brief, loving acoustic version. McLaughlin's "The Life Divine" is unfortunately one of his most derivative pieces. The vocal chant merely adds a modulation to the "Love Supreme" riff and the improvising is once more an extended jam on a single root.

"Let Us Go into the House of the Lord" is an arrangement credited to Santana-McLaughlin. Actually, it is close enough to Lonnie Liston Smith's arrangement of the same hymn (as recorded by Pharoah Sanders on Summun Bukmun Umyun) to be described as a cop. Again, the two guitarists scream away over a drone. About halfway through the tune McLaughlin gets into one of his machine-gun frames of mind and overwhelms Santana with a series of blistering, lightning-fast runs.

Here, at his most inspired, McLaughlin is exhilarating if a bit monolithic. Carlos Santana is no match for him technically—his note choices and the ways in which he organizes phrases and sets up climaxes are more circumscribed and predictable. On the other hand, McLaughlin rarely gives any quarter, and most of the feeling this album possesses—feeling as expressed by nuance, by inflection, by a lingering, savoring approach to the art of music making—comes when either Carlos or Khalid are soloing.

The last track is a pretty but light McLaughlin composition, with Santana on acoustic guitar and Mahavishnu on piano. The rhythm section is powerful throughout the album; the great Armando Peraza is on congas, and Billy Cobham, Don Alias, Jan Hammer and Mingo Lewis are on drums and percussion. Santana's Doug Rauch is a solid and creditable bassist. For the most part Love Devotion Surrender is simply high-powered, super-amplified jamming that takes off and roars. It is accomplished, well-played, beautifully mixed, and in many ways superior to both Birds Of Fire and Caravanserai. But the Coltrane tunes and the Smith-inspired "Lord" are not particularly well-served; once the blowing starts, the flavor of the compositions becomes irrelevant.

It is Coltrane's most accessible qualities, his spirituality and his more melodic writing, which are dominant here. Trane's methods for developing his tunes, for constantly challenging his own spiritual well-being by refusing to stop reaching for the unattainable, are largely ignored. Love Devotion Surrender will bring a great deal of pleasure and enjoyment to Santana and Mahavishnu fans, and to lovers of rock guitar in general. But it is no substitute for the original versions of "A Love Supreme," "Naima" and "Let Us Go into the House of the Lord." If LDS induces its listeners to seek out these primary sources (and checking out Khalid Yasin's new Lawrence Of Newark LP on Perception wouldn't be a bad idea either), it will become a much more important album than it now seems to be. (RS 140)

ROBERT PALMER