Richard Wagamese is an award-winning author. His book Indian Horse placed third in CBC's Canada Reads and was voted fan favorite. But did you know he is also a music journalist? This is his story on the newly released Jimi Hendrix album, People, Hell & Angels.
Jimi Hendrix. Two words that define rock and soul and blues. The experience of their axis, bold as love, holds you in its thrall like a purple haze hung in the cosmos where the wind calls Mary. If you grew up with it, you know. If you’re just discovering it, you’ll learn. Jimi Hendrix is the sound of genius. Raw. Wild. Exuberant.
He would have turned 70 this year. Some 43 years after his passing, the impact of his death at age 27 remains colossal. While music, and rock in particular, has steamrolled, evolved, shape-shifted and reinvented itself several times over since then, musicologists and fans alike enjoy musing about how he might have played today. They also like to reflect on how he would have altered the face of rock and popular music in general.
It’s a heady question. It always is, when you consider the possible effect of lost genius. In keeping with that idea, Experience Hendrix, the family company headed by Jimi’s sister Janie, is releasing People, Hell & Angels on March 6 – another in the legacy of posthumous, unreleased Hendrix recordings.
“I think music would probably be completely different in our world as we know it if he’d continued to record,” said Janie Hendrix, the CEO of Experience Hendrix. “I think he could be part of the tapestry that continued from '70 to the present.”
“His music would have had something like a big band feel, because that’s what he was going for in the early '70s and the music today would have been completely influenced by the music that he would have created through the years,” she said via Skype.
Imagine. He fills space eloquently. The guitar yowls, wails, screeches, implores and cajoles the muse forward, upward, outward, beyond all measure, beyond all restraint, until what remains is timelessness sought and captured by his intensity, his fire, his love.
The music on People, Hell & Angels sounds like a man prowling the edges of his genius. He works outside the framework of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and incorporates horns, keyboards, percussion and second guitar. It shows his willingness to experiment, the quality that would show itself on the posthumous First Rays of the New Rising Sun, his planned double album sequel to 1968’s Electric Ladyland.
“We’re thrilled to be able to release People, Hell & Angels during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of my brother’s birth,” Janie said. “The brilliance of the album serves to underscore what we’ve known all along: that there has never been and never will be a musical force equal to his.”
The 12 songs are a companion piece to 2011’s Valleys of Neptune, which showcased Jimi’s final recordings with the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. That album was critically lauded and People, Hell & Angels, with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles, along with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills playing bass on “Somewhere” and saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood on the never-before-heard “Let Me Move You,” has sufficient grit, fire and soul to match anything Hendrix put to record.
"Somewhere"
“Our overall direction has always been to take care of Jimi’s music, to keep everything authentically correct,” explains Janie. “So that when we put music out, we still use Eddie Kramer, who was his engineer and right-hand man when it came to studio recording. That’s to make sure his music is as pure today as when he created it.”
“He was definitely a genius and, like Beethoven and Bach, it’s music that’s very complicated and extraordinarily difficult to figure out how to play. That’s what really inspires young people, because there’s always something better that they can achieve by listening to his music.”
There’s a ton of inspirational and incendiary guitar work displayed here. There’s also the indelible imprint of Jimi’s genius as a songwriter and producer. He absolutely loved recording and the process of recording. If this is the last studio effort that comes from the vaults of Experience Hendrix, it’s a triumphant one.
Play this loud. Play this regularly. Let that fantastic guitar hit you and let the voice and the genius carry you away like it’s meant to. We lost him way too soon. But he lives in the music. Timeless, enduring, eternal.
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