Claude Duncan wrote: Yes, check your facts and whatever, then let's go with it. Change the lead, though. I'd rather see a general lead than the obscure reference to something in the paper some time back.
Jimi Hendrix
Damon LaBarbera
Thirty five years after his death--is it that long--Jimi Hendrix still incites interest from original fans and from many born in later decades.
Talk of Hendrix easily drifts towards the hagiographic: the enthusiasm of his fans may seem excessive or naive, or perhaps, more poetically, an echo of the fiery emotions stirred by his music. The guitar seemed directly cabled not to a stack of Marshall Amps but with our solar plexus, or so it seemed in those days when his music was so new and strange. Some classically trained guitarists may lift their noses at a pop idol, but he probably is, so the critics say, the best guitarist in any idiom at any time. In any case he was very good.
Only 27 when he died, he left a legacy of mature work undone, a tragedy of the unhealthy lives of artists and musicians. One might even realistically compare him to Mozart in the intensity of his energy. His talents were prodigious. . He could not have been anything but Hendrix. There was a certain single mindedness in the direction of his talent. He seemed to have some connection, like Mozart is said to have had, with the divine--or at least the divine within himself. There are guitarists and there are Hendrix. Like the Three Stooges, you either get Hendrix or you don't. Maybe you have to like art a little dissonant and anti-authoritarian and emotive, with a touch of the dissonant augmented fourth in our music and our lives to appreciate him.
His death gives a similar push to our love of him. He was not particularly tidy or systematic in his music and some of his best concert music was played with a popped string or while sheepishly tuning his guitar. He became better know first in England--having gone as a journeyman through a series of bands in the United States, and he was the white suburban boy's idea of hipdom. Why he was not so popular with blacks seems curious. But he had an adolescent machismo to mild manner white youth--a non threatening black when blacks were raising fists at Cornell and the Olympics. He did not fit the Motown style and was not politicized beyond the popular sentiments of peace and love at the time. Though Black Panthers did solicit funds from him after concerts. He made a big hit at Isle of Wite, recommended by another Southpaw, Paul McCartney. Hendrix was dressed fopishly, or British mod, with a hat looking like that of SNLs Father Guido Sarducci. A salad of racial genes, his experiences on a reservation was formative. He was after all, part Cherokee, and in his clothes displayed that allegiance. Exposed early on to the Cherokee tonal language, his singing could seem more like tonal talking, and he covered artists like Bob Dylan having a similar style of melodious chant. Naturally imagery abounded in his work--wind, castles in sand, the sea.
The Cherokee tonal language may have been nurtured his perfect pitch, the ability to produce and recognize any note, without referring to any other note. This skill, present in about 1 in 10,000 tends to develop in those raised with tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese. Nowadays, Julliard is filled with Chinese pianists. He could produce environmental sounds with uncanny accuracy. A train approaching a track, its horn blaring in alternating augmented fourths, the rails rattling, and then--whoosh--the sound of the Doppler effect as it passes: he could accurately mimic this sound with only ten fingers.
And hence he could create what musicologists call "tonal paintings", injecting environmental sounds into his music, creating musical equivalents of metaphor and metonymy. The actual scales he used, the underlying structure of the music was not particularly difficult--typical blues scales and do-re-me scales his backups tended to be and his backups were typically a bass player who pounded on the root note and a drummer who kept beat. Indeed, this is a feature of perfect pitch--enormous musical sensitivity but organized according to typical rules and patterns.
The everyday kid listening to his radio discerned the underlying structure, against which Hendrix played the music of the spheres. Like Mozart he had some pipeline to the divine. Like Cobain (another lefty), DH Lawrence, and Mozart, his death was relatively premature. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Artistic Self-Destruction. The corpus of works he left still interests us, and indeed, everyone, so to speak, plays Hendrix nowadays. What lesson can we learn from Hendrix? Hard to say, really, except perhaps the pedestrian warning against drug use. His talent seemed from another planet, and, as cautionary tale, his life transposes poorly to ours, mere earthlings.
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