The Dance of Maya

The sixth track of The Inner Mounting Flame, it was recorded by the original quintet at CBS Studios in New York in August 1971. Alan Kurtz of jazz.com described a guitar arpeggio and bass line in 10/8 that give way to a down-home electric blues, then fierce soloing, before the dark opening mood returns. He heard it as "part subterranean dirge and part electric blues hootenanny". Christgau named it his favorite on the album for the way it breaks into a blues, Kolosky called it a raving jazz-fusion hoedown with a menacing theme, and Freeman heard a skronky, showoffy take on the blues. In Hindu thought maya is the force that makes the changing material world seem to be the whole of reality.

The piece predates the band. McLaughlin said in 2021 that he had already been working on it with Cobham as a duo. A Beat Club film of Tony Williams' Lifetime from late 1970, with Williams, Larry Young, McLaughlin and Jack Bruce, includes an early version. It was never broadcast and surfaced online in 2023.

Live

setlist.fm logs 50 performances by the band, its fifth most played piece. On stage it stretched far past the studio length: 12:48 at the Whisky a Go Go in March 1972 and 20:39 at Berkeley that November. A 14-minute take from Central Park on 17 August 1973 came out officially in 2011. The 1980s band folded it into bass-solo medleys, and McLaughlin revived it with the 4th Dimension and Jimmy Herring on Live in San Francisco (2018). Greg Howe recorded it with Jerry Goodman for a 2005 fusion guitar tribute, and the Dixie Dregs, Bongwater and the California Guitar Trio have played it live. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1971 studio recording, as reissued on the compilation This Is Jazz #17 in 1996.