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This live set documents Hendrix at the genesis of his powers. While not a rock musician per se yet, Hendrix has already introduced a revolutionary approach to the blues sound and melody. For Hendrix, the guitar was an extension of the human voice. These tunes are brilliantly melodic and exploratory, with a refreshing angular vocabulary. The band occasionally strains at the seams here, with the all-star septet bursting with clamorous tribal energy. It's evident here that Jimi is a noisy guitarist who employs volume as a tool for tension and release. All in all this boot is a smattering of the dirty funk and blues, that Hendrix would dig into for the rest of his short but tempestuous life.
Being described as the Jimi Hendrix and the Charlie Parker of acoustic music must mean something to JD.
This show surely proves all of that and more. Always true to his roots his band offers far more than just "another version" of the covers included here. Where someone like Ricky Skaggs would use country's old weapons of choice -sentimentality and religion - to sweeten the often labyrinthine complexities of Appalachian music, JD knows how to utilise folk and jazz timing to take the trip to another level.
They don't just call him " the dobro's matchless contemporary master."
The audience filed out, stunned and bludgeoned. The comfortable had been disturbed. The merely hip had been driven back to protests of cacophony, anarchy, disorder. Some people believe that even at its best, the music of John Coltrane never achieved the free flow of Ornette (the comings together and conversation of Free Jazz), or the arranged blossoms of sound-clusters of Sun Ra, but us Trane'd folks believe differently. His music does have excitement and immense raw power – an experience in itself. 'Trane could beat himself bloody, pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only his effort as an answer. Perhaps that alone is his answer.
