Art & Creativity Quote by John McLaughlin

McLaughlin is smuggling a quiet provocation into what sounds like a friendly maxim: if you think music lives on the page, you’re only seeing the skeleton. Coming from a guitarist whose career was forged in high-wire settings (Miles-adjacent fusion, the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s controlled combustion, decades of improvisational brinkmanship), “interplay” isn’t a metaphor. It’s the job.

The line elevates relationship over material. Notes are inventory; interaction is economy. In ensemble music, especially jazz and improvisation, the most consequential events aren’t the ones written down but the micro-negotiations: a drummer laying back a hair, a bassist refusing the obvious resolution, a soloist hearing that refusal and pivoting mid-sentence. McLaughlin’s phrasing (“as important as the notes”) deliberately refuses the romantic notion of the lone virtuoso. Yes, chops matter, but their highest use is responsiveness.

There’s also a subtle critique of how music gets commodified and taught. Western pedagogy often treats correctness as the pinnacle: play the right pitches, in time, with clean tone. McLaughlin is insisting that correctness is entry-level, not the point. The “integral parts” are social: listening, risk, trust, and the willingness to be changed by what you hear.

In a culture that increasingly consumes music as isolated content - earbuds, algorithmic playlists, remote collaboration - he’s arguing for the irreducible value of presence. The notes can be identical night after night; the music can’t, because the conversation can’t.