Jimi Hendrix: An Experience
by Valerie Wilmer —  4/4/1968

There's no experience that compares to the first time the blues get to you. The hairs on your neck stand up and an uncanny churning sets up between your heart and your stomach. It's the universal experience that unites the blues world.
Today that world is wide open. The fences are down. The boundaries have been extended to take in the music's lovechild, rock & roll, and through the disciples of Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, the experience continues, though with the accent on a battering-ram intensity of sound, not nearly as convincingly as it might. But the important thing is that it keeps on happening.

Right now, across the Atlantic, a unique blues experience is taking place--the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a marriage between a couple of British rock merchants and an American Negro.

Although he has been adopted by the British faction of the flower-power syndrome as a kind of high priest, guitarist Hendrix, through the screaming bravado of his music, belongs to the other side of the love generation coin. Violence is, for him, an integral part of the blues of today, and so he feels free to play the guitar with his teeth, set his instrument on fire, hurl it against an amplifier.

"Our music is getting uglier," he has said, and it rages like an angry torrent, almost overpowering at times because of the amplification. But unlike so many of the loudness-is-synonymous-with-excitement groups, Hendrix's sound is not only highly electrified, but electrifying too.

From out of the musical maelstrom, the howl of the leader's guitar comes leaping like a thing possessed, lashing with the anguish of a stricken giant. In contrast to a fair proportion of rock guitarists, whose lack of an individual conception is shown up by the aimlessness of their playing, Hendrix is in firm control of his direction. In his use of feedback, for example, he stretches the notes over several bars, occasionally accompanying the harmonics emanating from this device with a highly developed melodic line.

He claims to have soaked up influences from "everyone from Buddy Holly to Muddy Waters and through Chuck Berry way back to Eddie Cochrane," and one an hear just about everything from sitarlike riffs to crying delta blues from his screaming strings.

"Cats I like now are Albert King and Elmore James," he said, "but if you try to copy them, want to play something note for note--especially a solo or a certain run that lasts over three seconds--your mind starts wandering. Therefore, you dig them and then do your own thing."

When the thin, stooped, sad-eyed young guitarist came gangling into London in September 1966, he gave the floundering local scene a much-needed injection and with his unkempt mane of busy hair started a fashion unprecedented since the heyday of the Presley sideburn. His hair style had already made him an outcast in Harlem, and when Chas Chandler, former bass guitarist with the Animals, and the group's manager, Mike Jeffery, first heard of him, he had taken refuge from the Uptown jibes in Greenwich Village. As Jimmy James, he was playing with his own combo of two months' standing, the Blue Flame.

"We just didn't feel like trying to get into anything because we weren't ready," recalled Hendrix, (his real name, incidentally), but for the two Britishers, he was saying something.

They foresaw a place for the shy young man with the despair-drenched voice and the reverberating electric guitar on the London scene and persuaded him to try his luck there.

"I said I might as well go because nothing much was happening," recalled the guitarist. "We were making something near $3 a night, and you know we were starving."

Hendrix was born 22 years ago on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle, Wash. He brought with him to England an aura of mystery concerning his origins and musical experience and a tailor-made line of hard-times-and-poverty stories. His colonial version of how he traded the life of an itinerant guitarist.

Source: http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=stories&subsect=story_detail&sid=336

1970 Down Beat Readers Poll
by Down Beat Readers —  12/31/1970

Following are the winners of the 1970 Down Beat Readers Poll:

Hall of Fame: Jimi Hendrix
Jazzman of the Year: Miles Davis
Record of the Year: Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Pop Musician of the Year: Frank Zappa
Pop Album of the Year: Blood, Sweat & Tears, Blood, Sweat & Tears Vol. 3
Big Band: Duke Ellington
Jazz Combo: Miles Davis
Alto Saxophone: Cannonball Adderley
Tenor Saxophone: Stan Getz
Baritone Saxophone: Gerry Mulligan
Soprano Saxophone: Wayne Shorter
Trumpet: Miles Davis
Trombone: J.J. Johnson
Clarinet: Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Flute: Herbie Mann
Drums: Buddy Rich
Vibraharp: Gary Burton
Bass: Richard Davis
Guitar: Kenny Burrell
Piano: Herbie Hancock
Organ: Jimmy Smith
Miscellaneous Instrument: Rahsaan Roland Kirk-Manzello & Stritch
Arranger: Quincy Jones
Composer: Duke Ellington
Male Vocalist: Leon Thomas
Female Vocalist: Ella Fitzgerald
Rock/Pop/Blues Group: Blood, Sweat & Tears