Congratulations to Adam Shatz on his excellent piece, “The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix.” (New York Review of Books (9 January 2014)
(https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/01/09/beautiful-sounds-jimi-hendrix/)
Copyright @ 2014 Peter Meyer Filardo
I wish to elaborate on two points indirectly touched upon in this article – first, Hendrix’s “Goddess” songs, and second, his “Late Style,” the rather different music from the last year and a half of his tragically foreshortened life (he died in September 1970, just two months shy of his twenty-eighth birthday).[1]
Beginning with “Little Wing” (as much about his late, beloved mother as about a “hippie chick”) Hendrix wrote a number of songs about female figures that would provide salvation, sometimes by means of taking him on a heavenly journey. In the last and most musically sophisticated, and largely instrumental, of these, “Hey Baby – The Land of the New Rising Sun,” however (recorded in July 1970 and released posthumously), the Goddess figure has arrived to rescue not only Hendrix, but all humanity by “spreading around love and peace of mind.” This is congruent with Hendrix’s deep, even utopian belief, in the personal and social healing powers of music.
The concept of Late Style, with its intimations of im/mortality and the interplay of the archaic and the anticipatory, aptly describes Hendrix’s quest, during the last year of his life, to express the most profound feelings, including the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, as both the last great bluesman and an avatar of Afro-Futurism.
Hendrix’s Late Style is on display at Woodstock, in the miraculous sixteen minute, four part suite that closes his performance: the “Star Spangled Banner” (not only invoking the Vietnam War, but also rewriting the arc of U.S. history as a life and death struggle between the forces of repression and freedom); “Purple Haze” (his most passionate love song, ending with a stunning coda in classical form that would have been instantly recognizable as such to Mozart or Beethoven); the so-called, profoundly introspective “Woodstock Improvisation” that in part foreshadowed the creative path of Hendrix’s “Late Style”; and “Villanueva Junction,” a solemn blues-form funeral march-like epitaph to an era (the 1960s) not yet over, much like the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony.
In his Late Style, Hendrix also alters, at times, his basic “sound,” adopting a more focused, insistent tone reminiscent of John Coltrane. The best example of this is his New Year’s Eve (1970) performance of his tone poem “Machine Gun” – a searing invocation of the Vietnam War, depicting the sounds of battle and the agony and fear of death felt by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. (It was this song — “that Goddamn mother fuckin’ Machine Gun” — that drew Miles Davis to meet and jam with Hendrix, and to attend Hendrix’s funeral, the last funeral Miles would deign to attend.)
Two masterpieces from the summer of 1970, “Incident at Rainbow Bridge” and “Pali Gap” are not available on Youtube due to copyright restrictions imposed by the Hendrix estate. The first is a sixteen-bar blues funeral march so intensely personal as to seem autobiographical. It is also innovative, in that the concluding blues chorus chord change has been altered to: A minor – D minor – A minor — F major – C major – G minor – G# minor – A minor. The instrumental “Pali Gap” is one of Hendrix’s very best compositions. It bears a striking formal and affective resemblance to the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s string quartet in Bb (Opus 130). Built out of a brief motif, “Pali Gap” is one continuously evolving melody, at once stoic and entreating.
At the Isle of Wight concert in late August 1970, Hendrix produced the definitive performance of his blues standard “Red House,” expressing the agonizing pain and sense of solitude due to his unrequited love for Linda Keith. The structure of the last five instrumental choruses recalls Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” in that each is built around a different note of the blues scale (I-Vb-I- iii [fantasia] – vii/ix), and the penultimate instrumental chorus is a slow fantasia, also recalling Bach’s use of a slow fantasia late in the “Goldberg Variations.” (Beethoven also employed this feature in his “Diabelli Variations.”)
Although death-haunted, Hendrix persevered. After completing his Electric Lady recording studio, he continued to make plans for the future, including setting a recording date with jazz arranger Gil Evans. Of all the rock musicians of the 1960s, Hendrix’s talent was the least time-bound, in part because it was the closest to absolute music, i.e., music without words, and one could have reasonably expected much of him in the future. It is a tragedy that we shall never know what beautiful sounds he would have continued to produce.
[1] In this connection it is worth noting that while Mozart is the quintessential musical prodigy, nevertheless the bulk of his greatest works, e.g., the opera “The Magic Flute” and his deathbed “Requiem” were composed after his 28th birthday.
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Jimi Hendrix for Thoughtful People 