Jade to Black

Traveling from East to West over thousands of years, tea has played a variety of roles on the world scene – in medicine, politics, the arts, culture, and religion. Behind this most serene of beverages, idolized by poets and revered in spiritual practices, lie stories of treachery, violence, smuggling, drug trade, international espionage, slavery, and revolution.

Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the 60s. He said that back then, there probably weren't 20 great bands in the world, so it was much easier to cover the scene comprehensively. I'd say he was reducing the issue a tad (especially in light of sets like Nuggets), but there is a kernel of wisdom in his observation. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix almost single-handedly rallied troupes from rock, pop, blues, jazz and soul on both sides of the Atlantic with his psychedelic call to arms, Are You Experienced?. In one fell swoop, he united the sounds of acts ranging from James Brown to The Beatles, and proved that young black men had as much a claim to rock's budding authenticity as any English mop tops. This could never happen again, as ironically, people like Hendrix contributed to a splintering of scenes and sounds that made common threads almost impossible to find (or wind) thereafter.