Jimi Hendrix Vision

Thus Radio One is a godsend. It is a compilation of seventeen "live" studio workouts by the original Experience (with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums). These previously unissued blasts of prime Hendrixiana were originally taped between February and December of 1967 for broadcast by BBC Radio in England. You can ride shotgun with Hendrix as he rockets into inner space with "Stone Free," roughs up the Beatles' "Day Tripper" with acid-gangster guitar and wades into the primordial blues ooze of "Hoochie Koochie Man." Experienced and Axis were definitive statements of intention and accomplishment, Monterey the formal announcement of his arrival. But Radio One is essential Hendrix because it reveals the development of his art at its earliest and, in some ways, most crucial junctures.

Jimi Hendrix's third and final album with the original Experience found him taking his funk and psychedelic sounds to the absolute limit. The result was not only one of the best rock albums of the era, but also Hendrix's original musical vision at its absolute apex…

Jimi Hendrix's second album followed up his groundbreaking debut effort with a solid collection of great tunes and great interactive playing between himself, Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and the recording studio itself. Wisely retaining manager Chas Chandler to produce the album and Eddie Kramer as engineer, Hendrix stretched further musically than the first album, but even more so as a songwriter…

Jimi Hendrix's second album followed up his groundbreaking debut effort with a solid collection of great tunes and great interactive playing between himself, Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and the recording studio itself. Wisely retaining manager Chas Chandler to produce the album and Eddie Kramer as engineer, Hendrix stretched further musically than the first album, but even more so as a songwriter. He was still quite capable of coming up with spacy rockers like "You Got Me Floating," "Up from the Skies," and "Little Miss Lover," radio-ready to follow on the commercial heels of "Foxey Lady" and "Purple Haze." But the beautiful, wistful ballads "Little Wing," "Castles Made of Sand," "One Rainy Wish," and the title track set closer show remarkable growth and depth as a tunesmith, harnessing Curtis Mayfield soul guitar to Dylanesque lyrical imagery and Fuzz Face hyperactivity to produce yet another side to his grand psychedelic musical vision…

Jimi Hendrix's second album followed up his groundbreaking debut effort with a solid collection of great tunes and great interactive playing between himself, Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and the recording studio itself. Wisely retaining manager Chas Chandler to produce the album and Eddie Kramer as engineer, Hendrix stretched further musically than the first album, but even more so as a songwriter…

Jimi Hendrix's second album followed up his groundbreaking debut effort with a solid collection of great tunes and great interactive playing between himself, Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, and the recording studio itself. Wisely retaining manager Chas Chandler to produce the album and Eddie Kramer as engineer, Hendrix stretched further musically than the first album, but even more so as a songwriter. He was still quite capable of coming up with spacy rockers like "You Got Me Floating," "Up from the Skies," and "Little Miss Lover," radio-ready to follow on the commercial heels of "Foxey Lady" and "Purple Haze." But the beautiful, wistful ballads "Little Wing," "Castles Made of Sand," "One Rainy Wish," and the title track set closer show remarkable growth and depth as a tunesmith, harnessing Curtis Mayfield soul guitar to Dylanesque lyrical imagery and Fuzz Face hyperactivity to produce yet another side to his grand psychedelic musical vision…

Posthumous reconstructions of unfinished works are inherently dangerous, principally because even the most capable scholar or producer can only make, at best, an educated guess as to how the work in question would have been completed. Indeed, in dealing with some such pieces, you're sometimes lucky to get the work of the artist claimed (the Mozart Symphony No. 37 is a case in point – it doesn't exist; the piece once labeled Symphony No. 37 and attributed to Mozart is now known to have been authored by Michael Haydn); and while there's no question that the songs on this CD were recorded by Jimi Hendrix, even the people who worked on the sides with him can't say which songs would have ended up on the finished version of First Rays of the New Rising Sun (assuming that he even ended up using that title for the album), or what embellishments he would have added to any of them in the course of completing them…

Hendrix had gone so long between albums, seemingly adrift stylistically at various times, that there's no telling exactly what direction he was finally going to end up working toward. This is a superb album, and a worthy if very different, earthier successor to Electric Ladyland's psychedelic excursions - the later tracks, ironically enough, cut at that album's long promised and long-delayed studio namesake - and also show him working in some genuinely new directions. For starters, Hendrix's voice emerges here as a genuinely powerful instrument in its own right - his voice was never as exposed in the mix of his songs as it is here; partly this is because Hendrix and engineer Eddie Kramer never finished embellishing the songs, or completed the final mixes…

Hendrix had gone so long between albums, seemingly adrift stylistically at various times, that there's no telling exactly what direction he was finally going to end up working toward. This is a superb album, and a worthy if very different, earthier successor to Electric Ladyland's psychedelic excursions - the later tracks, ironically enough, cut at that album's long promised and long-delayed studio namesake - and also show him working in some genuinely new directions. For starters, Hendrix's voice emerges here as a genuinely powerful instrument in its own right - his voice was never as exposed in the mix of his songs as it is here; partly this is because Hendrix and engineer Eddie Kramer never finished embellishing the songs, or completed the final mixes…