jimi hendrix

The previous album Amassakoul by these extraordinary musicians and desert tribesmen from the southern Sahara was one of the Best of Elsewhere 2006 and turned up in quite a few critics picks of last year.
If anything, this album -- dense, driving, intense, poetic and shot through with mercurial, stinging guitar work -- is superior to...

In a cover which looks like it was thought up by a couple of drug-addled on-line kids -- and with a title from a B-grade movie -- comes the latest album by one of the great ignored/overlooked/wayward talents from the South.
This is a man for whom a never-recorded, whiskey-soaked Sun session overseen by a voodoo priestess with Mick'n'Keith (c...

Quite why and how this 2004 album has turned up only now is a mystery to me, but here it. Better late than . . .
This old journeyman r'n'b singer co-wrote eight songs with Bob Marley in early '68 (a few appear on the Soul Almighty collection) and Marley recorded a number of his originals, and Norman apparently wrote some lyrics for the Irma...

This may not be the best live album King has made -- there is a case made for another under Essential Elsewhere, see tag -- but from his comments in the tie-in DVD bonus footage it will be his last.
In interviews King is breathless and wistful, and he has, at 82, all but retired.
He speaks now about when he is gone . . .
These concert...

Having once stood in torrential rain and mud up to my boot-tops at a New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to watch guitarist Sonny Landreth, I have always felt a strange loyalty to him.
I have faithfully reviewed his many albums but always came to the same conclusion.
Gifted though he obviously is -- and conceding his career performing...

It was probably about lunchtime in New York, but here in Auckland it was 4.30 am on a grim and watery Tuesday, hardly the best time to do a phone interview. Certainly not this prearranged caller to the man known as the Prince of Darkness and who has been known to open his end of the conversation with a terse “Don’t ask me no stupid...

There's a lot wrong with this double disc compilation: the title track is from the late Jeff Healy not by its author George Harrison; Thin Lizzy's Still in Love With You is the studio version rather than the far superior live one; you get soft-rockers Bread (Guitar Man) and Matthews' Southern Comfort (Woodstock) jammed between Fleetwood Mac's...

When David Harrington hit the stage it was with a lot of style. Wearing a lurex T-shirt, leather pants and ankle boots, and a tight black jacket he looked every inch the lean and rangy musician blowing into town for a couple of concerts.
Beside him was the group, also all in stylish black attire. And they were greeted with rapturous...

In a recent interview in advance of his Auckland concert next February, I put a quote to this guitar legend whose career started back in the mid-Sixties when he took over from Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds: that of all the guitar heroes his career had been the most slippery to follow.
He laughed and agreed -- then I told him that quote came...

The name Alan Douglas raises mixed feelings among Jimi
Hendrix fans. By a series of canny and right-place, right-time manoeuvres after
the death of Hendrix in 1970, Douglas -- a former jazz producer, and a friend
and adviser to Hendrix in his final years -- ended up as the curator of the
Hendrix legacy.
While others, notably the many...

There's a very good case to be made that The Jimi Hendrix Experience album of 1967 was the most accomplished and innovative debut of the rock era. (Indeed I hope I made the case for Are You Experienced at Elsewhere with my free-ranging, autobiographical essay Jimi Hendrix: In My Life).
This was an album which changed the boundaries of what...

It should be easy to get together a thorough Jimi Hendrix collection. After all, his recording career lasted fewer than four years.
Presumably, all you'd need would be his exceptional debut album Are You Experienced, the follow-up Axis: Bold As Love and the expansive, Essential Elsewhere double album Electric Ladyland. The Smash Hits...

My guess is that more journalists have written about Woodstock in the past four decades than there were people in attendance: the analysis started within a week of the August 1969 event when Time gave over a couple of pages to an essay (insightful even today) and a photo spread to address and try to interpret what had just happened at a farm in...

While I would never defend the man and his music in any serious way, I think every home should have a Ted Nugent album. (Cat Scratch Fever from '77 would be my guess but I will let fans correct me, my vinyl does sound very thin these days).
I would recoil at the thought of TWO Nugent albums however, but I am going to make an exception: one...

Like many artists on the ECM label, the Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal is largely faceless: you could have listened to his albums for decades as I have done and still pass him in the supermarket and not recognise him.
By my count he’s done about 20 albums under his own name on ECM, and appeared on almost as many others as one of...

It would be hard to imagine a more musically diverse, genre-defying and largely bewildering album than this by a South African rock band which has been swept off to Electric Ladyland Studios in New York where Brandon Curtis (of Secret Machines) has produced this meltdown of mad psychedelics, MOR ballads, reggae and African mbaqanga.
Nine...

This three-piece from Austin were everywhere in the UK media when they were touring while I was in England and Scotland in the middle of the year -- and I kept missing them. And the more I read the more interested I became: no one seemed to have a clear bead on them and while some cited Hendrix (it's the wah-wah pedal, folks) others mentioned a...

With their 89 breakthrough debut Vivid, Living Colour were hailed as the first black rock band, the politics of race/the media around them was talked up by the Black Rock Coalition, and guitarist Vernon Reid repeatedly noted now they were through the door the media (MTV, Rolling Stone etc) would close it. One black rock band was enough, thank...

Any box set or collection which tries to mop up an era, genre or decade is probably doomed to failure, not from lack of genuine effort but because some artists (the big ones) don't want to be included. So you can get a multiple disc, very inclusive set of the Eighties for example and it doesn't have anything by Madonna, Prince, Springsteen and...

You might have thought in the decade since Ken Burns' groundbreaking television series Jazz that there would have been a slew of DVDs out there on the market to add depth to what he showcased. But there hasn't really been.
Back before jazz was an "art form" few concerts were filmed for posterity. Jazz, by definition, was in the...

There have been any number of Southern blues, soul and rock'n'roll musicians who have struggled with their pull of their secular and spiritual sides: Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Son House, Al Green . . . and the great guitarist Roy Buchanan.
Arkansas-born Buchanan -- who died in an apparent jail-cell suicide in 1988 at age 48, although...

The merging of hip-hop and rock (via Run DMC with Aerosmith, Anthrax with Public Enemy, and others) lead to nu-metal and its many unfortunate bands such as Limp Bizkit.
But, as with the early days of hip-hop when there was an innocent and enjoyable experimentation, some of nu-metal's predecessors were more interesting than their offspring....

Somewhere among my old photographs at home is one of me standing beside John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls Royce. It was London in late ‘69 and -- aside from revealing the embarrassing affectation of a black cape -- it‘s most interesting for what is in the background: a Morris Minor of the kind that was considerably more common...

The old joke -- usually applied to the death of Elvis -- is “good career move”.
Death sells, just ask -- if you could -- Elvis, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain who saw their record sales soar after their deaths. Or would have, if they could have.
As a magazine cover said of Jim Morrison:...

As with Syd Barrett, the music of 13th Floor Elevators has been overshadowed by the story of the madness, in the case of the Elevators the increasingly bizarre behaviour of their frontman Roky Erickson.
Out of Austin, Texas in the mid Sixties, the Elevators were a raw and elemental garageband along the lines of England's Downliners Sect and...

Jeff Beck's career has certainly seem some troughs -- usually by virtue of his absence from playing when the mood didn't take him -- but latterly he has enjoyed some great highs.
His recent touring reminded again of what a colourful palette he commands -- from fusion rock to great delicacy, often within the same piece -- and that he does...

The English musician John Mayall
repeats his familiar refrain: he’s never had “a hit record, never
won and Grammy and isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame“.
At 76 and having played professionally
for more than 45 years he might have reasonably expected one or more
of those. But in 2005 he did get an OBE....

They used to say
“when the times get tough, the songs get soft” – but hard times
is good times for the blues which articulates the concerns of the
downtrodden.
And
the US economic downturn means hard times which this 70-year old,
electric and electrifying guitarist/singer from Texas (on a Chicago
label) addresses...

In the age of Cream (mid '66 to late '68), Blue Cheer and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the power trio became an established form and this group from Buckinghamshire -- two brothers and another -- took the hard rock, guitar pyrotechnics sound to the top of the British charts with this single. And that was about it for them.
That's actually...

Older, if not wiser, "heads" will know exactly who Dr Timothy Leary was -- an advocate of the widespread use of LSD to change cultural consciousness and to open individuals to the vastness of the cosmos within and without.
Tune in, turn on and drop out became a mantra in the late Sixties.
His album You Can Be Anyone This Time...

As we know, for every breakthrough band there are a dozen or more who can successfully coattail.
Tamikrest come from the same area -- geographical and musical -- as the great Tinariwan and Etra Finatawa so create a kind of hypnotic desert blues . But where their two predecessors have established a genre and staked out territory within it, the...

One of the more mindlessly amusing one-liners about the Sixties says that if you remember them t.hen you weren’t there. Duh.
That sitcom aphorism reduces the decade to flakiness and drugs, and bears no serious scrutiny at all.
By rule-of-thumb and common consensus, what are loosely called the Sixties are the five years between She...

Woodstock in '69 was the making of many artists: Ritchie Havens, the Who, maybe even Sha Na Na . . . and certainly Sly and the Family Stone's whose I Wanna Take You Higher was one of the exciting high-points of the movie, if not the event.
This double disc set -- with a Sly-at-Woodstock wall poster -- has one disc of the whole of their...

Varying the speed of tapes in the studio is not uncommon, but asking that your listener get up and change the speed of their record player on an album is another thing entirely.
Certainly there have been singles which play one side at 45 and the other at 33 (often 12" singles or EPs from the Eighties) -- but in '68 the increasingly...

Todd Rundgren laughs as he predicts
the end the current model of on-line music sales which will disappear
like the Sony Walkman and vinyl singles: “Because some songs are
priceless, some songs are worthless . . . and some songs are worth
exactly 99 cents”.
He should know. In a 40-plus year
career he's made songs, and whole...

My collection of schoolboy poetry which I would agonise over late at night, laboriously using my Scripto fountain pen and Radiant Blue ink, has long since vanished. Thank God. I’m sure it was full of adolescent anxieties -- one “poem” was about Oedipus, about whom I knew nothing other than I liked the name.
But one piece...

With the ever-evolving Rundgren scheduled to play in New Zealand see interview here) here was a five CD collection of some of his albums from 1970-83 which skip over his double album Something/Anything, the glorious A Wizard/A True Star and the double Todd.
But here are Runt (Rundgren with the Sales brothers who later worked with Bowie); The...

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when
Eric Clapton -- once called "God" by his devotees -- ceased
to be relevant. Certainly he still plays to huge audiences and his
guitar playing remains technically undiminished.
But his albums are --with rare
exceptions -- anodyne, his playing often bloodless and despite
genuine efforts to find...

It has been almost half a century since
Elmore James bent over to pull up his socks before going out to play
in an Chicago nightclub . . . and went face down on to the floor with his
third and final heart attack.
Although he was not widely known, the
world lost a good one who left an immense legacy.
James had an agonised vocal style...

B.B. King (born Riley King on a
plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi in 1925) has arguably been the
blues' greatest populariser, so his track record includes
performances with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Stevie Wonder and the
Memphis Horns, Joe Walsh, the Crusaders, Gary Moore and, of course,
U2 and Eric Clapton.
That kaleidoscope of...

For Davis' most pure jazz followers who had forgiven him the street corner funk of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the trumpter was a lost cause on his return in '81 after almost a decade without any new studio material.
From Man with the Horn to Your Under Arrest ('85) he was widely criticised for simply failing to play trumpet in any...

By the time Johnny Guitar Watson made the album of which this was the title track, he was 42, had been on about 15 different labels and had really paid his dues: he'd started recording at 17, been something of an r'n'b star in the Fifties and by the Seventies had edged his way to streetcorner funk.
He pioneered feedback on Space Guitar in...

Ronnie Wickens was one of the last to leave my 50th birthday party at Portside. As I made for the door I looked back, and there he was at the bar chatting to -- maybe even chatting up -- a couple of girls in their 20s, friends of my sons' no doubt. Ronnie was somewhere past 60, but he still looked great.
I don't recall what he was wearing...

Carlos Santana, who says rarely a day
goes by when he doesn't listen to some Miles Davis, believes you only
have to listen to the Davis' album Live at the Plugged Nickel --
recorded in December 65 at a Chicago club but not released until '68
-- to realise the trumpeter had exhausted standards such as Stella
By Starlight and On Green Dolphin...

For a man who changed the landscape of rock -- and not so coincidentally my life -- his last resting place looks extremely modest. It is late 2002 and I am standing at a simple plaque in the grass with only a single glass of fading flowers on it. There are no visitors here other than me and my companion Tommy, a Norwegian music journalist from...

Classical artists playing the music of Jimi Hendrix is hardly a new idea: the Kronos Quartet had a crowd-pleasing built-in encore of Purple Haze when they first started out, and of course Nigel Kennedy finally made good on his threat/promise to do an album of Hendrix.
Before them however in the mid Seventies Gil Evans arranged some Hendrix...

For many of the open-eared among jazz listeners -- those who had grown up on rock guitarists and heard in Hendrix the vanguard of a fusion, followed Miles Davis through Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, had albums by John McLaughlin and understood jazz-funk -- it seemed as if guitarist-singer James Blood Ulmer was going to deliver them from...

Because of the sheer number of his recordings out there, you'd be forgiven for thinking that when he wasn't playing a gig (and being recorded), having sex or sleeping, the great Jimi Hendrix was in a recording studio jamming, putting down demos or just simply noodling around.
Which seems to have been true.
The man only saw the...

The great Guy has been one of blues' most enduring and endearing characters: he upstaged the Stones in his cameo slot on their Shine A Light doco, and way back influenced Hendrix.
He's been picking up awards for the past couple of decades, but unlike some others who have become part of the institution (and tailor albums for awards, as...

It's well known that Jimi Hendrix didn't have much business sense, but he sure knew how to play guitar. This track -- one of about 60 recorded with the little known singer/guitarist Curtis Knight at a small studio in New York -- is a measure of both.
Hendrix -- at that time Jimmy James -- had recently been fired from Little Richard's touring...

In 1964 the Isley Brothers – a
doo-wop/r'n'b outfit from Cincinnati who had scored a hit with Twist
and Shout – were playing a show in a baseball stadium in
Bermuda. They had their own in-built support act, they simply sent
their band out to warm up the crowd. But on this night there was
whooping from the audience and a guy came...

Scroll down the Wikipedia entry for
Gregg Allman and two things will surprise: first how brief it is for
a musician who has lived such a full, creative and often dangerously
self-abusive life.
And second the interestingly inexact sentence
which reads, “Allman has been married at least six times . . .”
By the time he was...

This band -- who later shortened their name and became simply "Chicago" -- have appeared at Elsewhere previously with their thunderous and extended version of the old Spencer Davis Group hit I'm a Man (here).
The point was made then that after a fine start as an underground and somewhat radical band -- their debut double album from...

When Kiwi acid-rockers Ticket from the early Seventies re-formed towards the end of 2010 for a couple of gigs it was hoped that this reissue of their trippy classic, Hendrix-inspired album would be available at the door.
But that didn't happen because . . . Lots of reasons I suppose.
But here it is now, remastered and in a gatefold sleeve...

The great jazz, post-Hendrix and entirely Elsewhere guitarist James Blood Ulmer delivered exceptional albums of post-Ornette Coleman harmolodic music such as Tales of Captain Black and Are You Glad To Be In America on John Snyder's short-lived but creditable Artist House label.
But then he slowly evaporated from...

By the time Eric Clapton flew to Miami
in 1970 to record what would become the Layla and Other Assorted
Love Songs double album, he had spent six years in an emotional
wringer: he was the acclaimed guitarist in the Yardbirds before he
abruptly quit over dissatisfaction with their pop direction; took
time out; joined John Mayall in his Blues...

Even those who have been his most ardent champions concede that guitarist Jeff Beck has always taken his own wayward path, often following a great album with an indifferent one.
He may lack career focus -- he takes time out frequently -- but his recent years have seen him acclaimed for the consistency of his live performances, and the petty...

When the Kronos Quartet closed their first album for the Nonesuch label in '86 with this brittle version of Jimi Hendrix's '67 hit even liner note writer Gregory Sandow had to concede that, after a programme of works by Peter Sculthorpe, Aulis Sallinen, Philip Glass and Conlon Nancarrow, it had all the hallmarks of a built-in encore.
Known...

Excellent though the recent Jeff Beck, Imelda May and others CD of this concert was -- a salute to the late guitar player and designer Les Paul -- this DVD film of the concert (and then some) is a leap ahead, and not just because the live show by these people is such fun, but because the extra footage is engrossing.
At some point you may...

Here's one from the pub quiz: Who topped the Melody Maker poll in '72 in the best guitarist category?
Of course a more interesting question might be, "How come Ireland's Rory Gallagher beat out Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Steve Howe, Leslie West and all those axe-slingers of the day?"
Gallagher -- who died in '95 of liver...

This chock-full 17-track tribute to Jimi Hendrix arrives on no significant Hendrix anniversary: his short career in the headlines was bookended by his arrival in London in late '66 and he died there in September '70.
And although this isn't the first (nor will it be the last) tribute to his particular genius, there is always a place to...

As with Bob Marley's "catalogue", it seems only right that Jimi Hendrix's messy existence -- he seemed to a sign a contract at the drop of an offer, and would record with whomever when the mood took him -- should be reined in and given some coherence.
So when the Hendrix family finally wrestled a measure of control after years of...

1969 was a bad year for Hendrix. Despite his superb Electric Ladyland
double album at the tail end of the
previous year, he still had an audience wanting to hear Purple Haze,
was frustrated with the Experience band and was looking for a new direction.
In August 1969 he appeared at Woodstock
with an expanded band line-up but that...

Two things strike you immediately about this much vaunted and Grammy award-winning doco: That Jim Morrison was a man of brooding good looks except when he smiled and then he looked just plain goofy (and there is a lot of him smiling and laughing in the early footage here); and that the script which Johnny Depp reads in a tired monotone seems to...

The great Isley Brothers out of Cincinnati have hardly received their due by rock and pop writers (although they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in '92).
Yet they crafted some of the sassiest, slippery and and most sexy funk-rock'n'pop of their era, which was long. They first troubled the charts in '59, were dominant if not...

Soulful
blues with a dark bayou twist is Tab Benoit's musical style, but he also
locates lyrics in this world, whether it be a relationship going to
hell (“We've been fighting over nothing”) or the Louisiana
environment on the same path (“Whatcha gonna tell the
children/trees/spirits when the heart of the bayou...

From the moment Jimi Hendrix arrived in London in the early hours of September 24 1966 to his death in the same city just a few days short of four years later, he seemed to be constantly moving, playing and recording.
He played his first jam in London the night he arrived, and a fortnight later -- after jamming with the Brian Auger Trinity,...

Eric Burdon is alive and ... well, the fact that this founder member of Britain's legendary 60s r'n'b garage band The Animals is alive is enough to be happy with, let alone that he sounds well. Speaking from his California home in Joshua Tree, Burdon -- croaky of voice and lucid, if tangential, in conversation -- sounds extremely well for a man...

Oddly enough, this is not the best time to talk to 64-year-old bluesman Buddy Guy - despite him having released Sweet Tea, one of the finest albums in his long career.It is days after the death of his contemporary John Lee Hooker and Guy is understandably philosophical rather than keen to talk up his new album which was, uncharacteristically for...

A few kilometres south of the busy and
breezy port town of Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast is the
dusty village of Diabat, famous for one thing. In mid 1969, Jimi
Hendrix didn't go there.
Not that the owner of the local cafe
would admit to that. Quite the opposite in fact.
The cafe – which played an endless
loop tape of...

Stanley liked to talk but, to be fair, he had a lot to talk about.
Stanley -- portly, smiling, intense -- was the manager at New York's famous, notorious even, Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd St.
He had inherited the position from his father David Bard who bought it in 1940, and Stanley had grown up in the corridors of this building which...

"And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"
Time for reflection amidst (hopefully) enjoying family and friends . . . and we will all do that in our own way.
Jimi did it this way.
This was part of some long studio jamming, the first two songs here were recorded in December '69 with drummer Buddy Miles and bassist...

A simple wrong turn and the pressure of traffic forced us to carry on down the road, looking for an exit. But then, through a set of traffic lights, we were there.
"This it," I shouted. "Look. This is it."
I drove on as slowly as the urgent traffic would allow but we looked around at the slow dip and curve of the...

With his royal surname, a 60-year career which has earned him Godfather status, a sophisticated demeanour and dapper suits, and his own chain of nightclubs it is hard to see BB King as an earthy and edgy blueman: the guy who used to play 300 nights a year, who has fathered at least a dozen children to as many different women, the...

Stephen Stills -- of Crosby, Stills and Nash -- says that Turner reminds him of his old friend Jimi Hendrix, and you can certainly hear that sky-scaling Jimi-approach in any number of the blistering tracks on this powerful album.
But Turner does pull back in some material -- which still seem to seethe with menace.
This album won't be to...