Jimi Hendrix is one of the great pop icons of the 1960s. His death remains one of the crucial events in the history of rock music. However, his ouvre is perhaps less salient, as too many of his records are botched. Hendrix was one of the most exploited artists in the record industry, who did not hesitate to publish everything that Hendrix had played. Hendrix recorded two great albums (the first and third). But above all he invented a guitar style that was more than a style: it was a declaration of war on western harmony. Hendrix's guitar opened new doors to experimentation on the musical instrument. His lesson would be applied not only to the guitar but also to the keyboards, to any instrument that drives the melody in rock music. Hendrix's case as a guitarist is unique in the history of modern music: Hendrix is ​​systematically tops the "polls" of critics in the world, even those of jazz. There is no such unanimity for singers or drummers or keyboard players. His stature as a guitarist is comparable to that of Beethoven as a symphonist.

His guitar style was born out of three fundamental experiences (all outside of Chuck Berry's rock guitar): the rhythm and blues of Chicago (Muddy Waters, Elmore James), the soul of Memphis and the improvisation of the jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. Although Hendrix cited both the bluesman Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry as influences, it is difficult to perceive them in his music. If anything, the influence of British bands like the Yardbirds, Who and Cream are more evident, at least in the early records. And technically speaking, Earl Hooker, Johnny Watson and Lowman Pauling were the first blues guitarists to use certain sound effects.

Hendrix was truly a great, extraordinary guitarist, perhaps the first major to the instrument in the entire history of music, certainly the one who redefined its sound. But the Hendrix phenomenon was an abject and shameless commercial phenomenon, not much more noble than that of Presley and the Beatles.

From a strictly technical point of view, his merit was to open new horizons to the electric guitar, the instrument par excellence of rock music. Left-handed and illiterate, virtuosity and experimentation found the greatest interpreter in him. Electrification, amplification and improvisation, blues, jazz and rock converged in his musical extremism. His technique reached everywhere, he exploited all the sound effects (distortions, delay, wah-wah), capable of expanding the sound along unexplored stairs. All the mimicry of the hand, of the arm, even of the mouth, became functional for making sounds on the guitar, to bend the notes under the most sadistic tortures to the most repellent effects (sound with the entire palm of the hand, with the teeth, with the elbow, even with the microphone stand).

All instrument technology (from finger-picking to wah-wah, from pick to pedals, from feedback to the Larsen effect, from tone controls to distortion) became an instinctive science of timbre. Thus cannibalized (and at the end of the show burned, condemned to the stake), his "sperm-guitar" gave the measure of excess, that excess, not as a means but as an end, which "was" his art. Hendrix "invented" the electric guitar, enhancing its tonal and tonal potential, using it in all possible ways. With him the guitar became an orchestra, a sound machine with an almost infinite range of possibilities, up to the limit of the parody of the human voice.

The improvisation started from the blues scale, but the theme was left free to expand almost indefinitely. With Hendrix the guitar even acquired a psychology. His highest teaching is perhaps in the fluent inventiveness of his solos and rhythm: exploring every corner of the sound, making the strings of creativity "vibrate" in every lost recess of the sound universe. Thus enhancing the dialectic abilities of the instrument, he materialized an uncontrollable inner ego, whose delusions are expressed with an irrational grammar to the maximum degree.

And, extending the role it played in the blues, he made it more than an instrument: a phallic symbol (simulations of embrace), a scream of war (self-destruction rites), the wild voice of extreme sensations (sensuality `primitive), an instrument of revenge on negritude, an animal now domestic now wild, a dance companion, a friend with thought, feeling and word, an appendage to body and mind. At the end of each show he gave vent to a sado-masochistic ritual of masturbation and destruction of the instrument (or of himself). Hendrix elevated that instrument to totemic symbol for an entire generation.

Hendrix was primarily the king of the ocean gatherings. The young man who needed to somehow exorcise the civilization of the machine identified with his virtuosity, in his mastery of the instrument, in his ability to dominate the machine: Hendrix represented for him the myth of the liberator, that type of super- man that the sub-culture of cinema and comics was turning into the super-hero. Cult of violence, virility, will of power: the excitement of the mass "costs" the leader to adhere to titanic and nihilistic philosophies that automatically condemn him to self-annihilation. It is a heroic gesture, the officiant's voluntary sacrifice, according to an ancestral and in particular Christian purification ritual.

His solo career is divided into two periods: one in which he continues to grow his mastery of the instrument and Hendrix discovers the expressive potential of the guitar day by day; and one in which he has quickly "burned" all his discoveries and no longer knows what to do to hit, surprise, scandalize. Most of his music is to be thrown away, much of the rest is barely discreet. Only the first album is true glory, perhaps because at that time Hendrix's wild instinct was not yet dazed and watered down by the advertising and social hype. Later, trying in vain and with pathetic obstinacy to imitate himself, he knew how to be unbearably academic and often cloying.

Hendrix's lyrics (perversely visionary, of a romantic religion that placed himself at the center of every prayer first and foremost) lend themselves to disturbing misunderstandings, with continuous soft references to death ( Will I Live Tomorrow), to the magical and the supernatural. The most genuine inspirations came from the black religion and the charm of the heavenly immensities. Here his fantasy stretched into long monologues and wide dreams that testify to all man's solitude, introversion and fear, his intimate need for purity and tranquility, the fundamental insecurity and psychic fragility of a young man baffled and unbalanced by success.

Her limpid, black, painful, calm song is Hendrix's other voice (the other ego). That sour and impetuous voice always seems to come from a mysterious distance. Anguish does not deform its supernatural inflection much. And in the absurd composure of the song, the gloomy bitterness of the defeated, the archaic one of the plantations and the modern one in the spotlight finds its outlet.

The least obvious component of his artistic message was the ceremonial one. Hendrix incorporated voodoo rhythms taken directly from the ritual dances of Africa and indulged in the sacrificial rituals in which he destroyed the guitar. In his genetic code, ancestral information remained and his mission would have been to transplant it into the iconography of rock and roll.

James Marshall Hendrix, born on November 27, 1942 in Seattle from a cross between Indians, blacks and whites, began playing the guitar at eleven years old, shortly after losing his mother. At sixteen he left school to go wandering, earning a living with rhythm and blues and rock and roll complexes. After having served as a paratrooper for more than a year, the 21-year-old Hendrix entered with some success in the session-man lap. Little Richard's guitarist Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, King Curtis was gradually introduced. In 1965 he formed his first complex at Greenwich Village and got a contract to perform regularly. The fame of the prodigious guitarist reached the ears of Chas Chandler, ex- Animals and now manager, passing through New York and looking for new talent.

Without thinking twice, Chandler took him back to London, got him a (mediocre) rhythmic section, made him engrave an epic cover like Hey Joe (recorded in October 1966, written by Billy Roberts in 1962 ), introduced him to London's rock circles (propitiating friendship with Donovan, perhaps the most enduring of his life) and organized a couple of tours in Europe.

As the 45 rpm climbed the charts (voiced almost immediately by the martial Purple Haze, recorded in January 1967), Hendrix's powerful blues-rock was reaping warm acclaim everywhere, and Chandler was working to advertise his pupil as a sex flag and drugs, taking care of the choreography of his shows and costumes to wear as much as the repertoire. Hendrix, a docile performer of the manager's suggestions and aware of how to galvanize the public it was enough to behave in the most instinctive way, started playing the guitar with his teeth and moving it as a sexual member under psychedelic lights.

After a third 45 rpm, the romantic The Wind Cries Mary (recorded in January) , in May 1967 the first album was released: Are You Experienced. The sound is that of an amphetamine blues-rock with high explosive potential, grouped into short, rough and deadly loads of TNT which erupt in one breath the volcanic energy of the guitar.
The pounding sensual grit of Foxy Lady, the epileptic attack of Manic Depression, the hypnotic mantra of Love Or Confusion, with the distorted voice in the background, the reverberations, the stirrups and the breathtaking pursuits of I Don't Live Today, Fire's visceral soul. At the bottom of the album the sexual nightmare of the title track unfolds, which celebrates, with solemn emphasis on an obsessive rhythm of raga, the sacredness of the experience and it is also the moment when the guitar can hover without more chains, quivering, convulsive agitation, spasmodic twisting, blathering on the elements a cacophonic mantra.
The real Hendrix is ​​the supersonic one of Third Stone From The Sun, the longest and most experimental piece on the disc, a tour de force of the psychedelic guitar, a cosmic ride, a heroic journey during which the voice (filtered and slowed down) moans dark words, the guitar rears up, free in huge spaces, cross the doors of perception, in a vortex of annoying hisses at a wild jazz rhythm. Hendrix gradually degrades the sound, passing from an iterated riff to a pure skinning of the strings to grant them to the universal chaos, in a chaos of vibrations and intermittences; until the final explosion.

The Monterey festival (June 18, 1967) was Hendrix's consecration as a live animal. At the end of his grueling performance (with a demonic version of Wild Thing), after setting the guitar on fire, he collected an endless ovation. He was the real star of 1968, acclaimed as the greatest guitarist of all time and surrounded by a mythical aura of contempt for bourgeois values.

Axis Bold As Love, released in December 1967, has already lost a bit of the energy, vitality and originality of the first album. The ferocity of the first disc is found only in Little Miss Lover. The sound is slower and softer, the rhythm and blues of the apprenticeship the check on the blues-rock of maturity. More pictorial and narrative than visceral, the album of the tender Little Wing, Bold As Love and Castles Made Of Sand triumphs in the only cosmic "trip", If 6 Was 9, mindful of free-jazz and acid-rock. There is no doubt that the production is much more accurate (each sound is slightly extravagant and the guitar explores dozens of techniques, sometimes within the same song), but, compared to the previous one, this is a step-down.

Electric Ladyland, whose recording was completed in August 1968 and that was released in October 1968, is an ambitious double album. The mood has drastically changed: Hendrix is no longer tough, he is a metaphysical poet. Only the convulsive boogie of Crosstown Traffic and the martial psychedelic dirge of Burning Of The Midnight Lamp bring back to the red-hot climates of the debut work. If the many soul songs scattered on the four sides are mediocre self-imitation exercises, the apex of the disc is represented by the two long delusions of Voodoo Chile and 1983, emblematic of the two creative sides in which Hendrix's art was more innovative.
Voodoo Chileshows how Hendrix's guitar style could only ennoble (and in turn be exalted by) the dramatic genre par excellence. Intense and vibrant, with Steve Winwood on keyboards and Jack Casady on bass, Voodoo Chile also develops according to the improvised patterns of classic jazz jam. The flow of improvisation is entirely functional to the imaginative and painful acting of the guitar, which now claws the notes one by one in the spasmodic cadence of the agony, now strikes chords of rebellious, rough and neurasthenic anger, threatening and arrogant, vulnerable and helpless. The ego-trip of the gypsy maudit is his hallucinated autobiography.
1983(on which Hendrix plays all the instruments except the flute) is the pioneering sonata par excellence of the Hendrix-ian repertoire beyond Third Stone From The Sun. The mass of sound effects transforms the "song" into a work of "sound painting". A cosmic-psychedelic vertigo oscillates for a long time between electronic noise and jazz improvisation to finally rise in a rushing wind, in a pressing progression that at the height of the orgasm turns into an abysmal vertigo. And the music dissolves in a flood of hisses, the cosmic mirage that always returns to the bottom of Hendrix's darkest nightmares, as an extreme need for purification after the journey into the underworld of the soul.

1968 actually marked the beginning of a very precocious and total decline, physical, moral and artistic. The first disagreements occurred within its complex, the Experience. Hendrix began to indulge more and more in the attitudes that excited the girls and to think less and less about music. He was arrested in Sweden for breaking up the hotel room. The following year he separated from Chandler. He was arrested twice, the first for hooliganism, the second for drugs. He had moved to New York, where he attended the "Black Panther". In August, at the height of his histrionic skills, already a living legend, he triumphed in Woodstock with a completely distorted version of the American anthem ( Star Spangled Banner ) during which the guitar imitates the bombing of Vietnam. Posthumous,LIve At Woodstock (MCA, 1999) which contains all its legendary performance. He then formed the first black-only rock complex, the Band of Gypsys, with Buddy Miles on drums and Billy Cox on bass. On the live Band Of Gypsys (Capitol, 1970), recorded in the last year of 1969, the logorroic delirium of Machine Gun stands out. Posthumously a double Live At The Fillmore East (MCA, 1999) will be released, which includes other material from the same period. With that line up, in August 1970, now visibly in crisis, he played without enthusiasm at the Isle of Wight festival.

He died a month later, due to excess of barbiturates, in a friend's apartment. Chandler's laconic "had to happen" was basically the comment of everyone who knew him (and who perhaps had caused that death).

His death became in a few years the greatest record occasion of all time. The producers unloaded on the market all the records that Hendrix had destined for pulping. Dozens of posthumous records were published, almost all of poor quality, with huge sales successes.

On the first posthumous album, Cry Of Love (Reprise, 1971), the style is a pleasant, but not revolutionary soul-rock: Ezy Rider, Drifting, Freedom, Astro Man, Angel are the most lucid songs, chock full of arcs riffs -notes and verses that sound obvious.

Rainbow Bridge feeds on a dark and primitive energy: Paligap is an unusually unbalanced song, pervaded by existential moods; Dolly Dagger sinks in sinister rhythms; and Room Full Of Mirrors is a Freudian-tribal nightmare.

Cry of Love and Rainbow Bridge contain the material that Hendrix was preparing for a new double album, First Rays Of The New Rising Sun.

In The West (1972) he still portrays him dealing with some psychedelic power-blues ( Red House ).

The last interesting riff is that of Steppin Stone, on War Heroes (1972).

Concerts (Reprise, 1989) collects perhaps the best material.

Examining the music of posthumous discs it is easy to realize how the mood of his music was changing, less and less savage and more and more painfully meditated.

Hendrix also played bass on Timothy Leary's You Can Be Anyone (1970), with Buddy Miles on drums, Stephen Stills (Buffalo Springfield) and John Sebastian (Lovin 'Spoonful) on guitars.

Over the next thirty years more than one hundred albums will come out with "unreleased" recordings of his music.

Hendrix's unfinished music, the hundreds of fragments glued as best as they could by the record industry to endlessly exploit his image, speak volumes about the squalor that surrounded the environment of rock music. The result is that, judging from the aftermath records, Jimi Hendrix seems to be one of the most mediocre musicians of the time.

The sad saga of exploitation by Jimi Hendrix continued in the 1990s, when the heirs fought over Hendrix's work in an endless series of trials. Legal quarrels led to the name being changed to the Seattle museum which was to become the Jimi Hendrix Museum.

Hendrix was always a phenomenon managed by others: by Chandler who built his artistic life piece by piece, by the record masters who exploited him alive and dead in the most foul way, by the masses of rock festivals who did what they didn't they had the courage to be, by the committed young men who wanted him dead for the cause. In fact with him died, by overdose of utopia, the generation of the student riots.