McLaughlin and company have been playing as a unit for a little more than a year as of this writing, but from the sound of their most recent performances and especially the new Birds Of Fire it seems they are as attuned to each other as a group of five musicians are ever going to get. McLaughlin, violinist Jerry Goodman and pianist Jan Hammer all command such quick improvisatory skills that when the three trade riffs on amplified instruments it's difficult at first to discern which one is playing. And Billy Cobham's ambidextrous drumming is the current phenomenon of the percussion field. At its core the Mahavishnu Orchestra is a rock & roll band: Its major trick is the infusion of supertechnical improvisatory skills into a rock idiom, but beneath the devotional messages to his guru and the appeals to a mass enlightenment of human consciousness, McLaughlin takes his with the heaviest of creams; pass the Bessemer Converter please, and watch out!

"Birds Of Fire" wards off the little devils with some gentle gonging and then Cobham blasts off, launching the rhythm with an engineering precision that is never uninteresting. I could listen to the drum tracks to this LP alone a couple of times and not get bored. Goodman's building thematic riffs are as always the perfect wave for McLaughlin's double-barreled stun-gun guitar to surf on. Jan Hammer's gentle, trickling overture to "Miles Beyond" (Miles Davis' tune) belies the hard sound that soon takes over. Hammer and Goodman have a marvelous pizzicato duet, the latter picking his electric violin while Hammer expertly comps. McLaughlin's jolting, seemingly automatic guitar is fast and loud almost beyond belief. "Celestial Terrestial Commuters" (Sri Chinmoy lives in Queens, you see) begins with some other-worldly insectine Moogery from Hammer in front of one of the orchestra's ringing chime themes and features amazing guitar-violin dialogue. "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" consists of 20 seconds of pulsar language, leading into "Thousand Island Park," an acoustic number modeled after "A Lotus on Irish Streams," from The Inner Mounting Flame. McLaughlin's acoustic playing appeals on a more peaceful if less visceral level, his facility of technique being far more appreciable on the wooden instrument, "Hope" is a two-minute coda structured on an extended single phrase. Higher and Higher is the message.

Side two is brought into focus with Cobham's nimble drum magic for the introduction to "One Word." To these ears it's the most dramatic percussion since Elvin Jones' beginning to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," nine years ago. Bassist Rick Laird finally gets a chance to cook for more than a couple of bars, and then guitar, keyboard and violin swirl around each other in the clouds somewhere, trading gorgeous figures with ease and pleasure.

The lugubrious, somewhat ominous theme of "Sanctuary" contrasts with "Open Country Joy," a beautiful vehicle for mellower passions for a few seconds, then exploding into more Mahavishnu fire music.

So where do you turn when you've had your fill of ambi-sexual pop-tart rock, when the moaning L.A. pseudobumpkins get on your nerves, the soul sisters and brothers start to sound prepackaged and your brain is beaten by the latest attempt to set the pre-pubes on the rock & roll warpath? What's left that has any quality and still has the guts to rock on? Here it is. (RS 128)

STEPHEN DAVIS