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The great Jimi Hendrix's posthumous record, we know, does not exist. There is a "Smile" on which fantasizing, there is a Holy Grail of which try to reassemble the pieces (we are talking here of study material, because among the countless documents live - the box of concerts Winterland in October '68, for one thing - the treasures, some recent, there). We are satisfied, therefore, sketches, doodles, tests, trials, experiments scattered in a few years of intensive work without breaks for a musician so taken by its mission to be passed in the recording studio (the Sound Center, the Hit Factory, the Record Plant in New York ) every time before clipping to build a toy of his own in which sbizzarrissi in peace (the Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village is still working). Affastellando coils on coils, strips of tape that Experience Hendrix's stepsister Janie directed by L. extracted with systematic and diabolical perseverance of a drawer seemingly bottomless entrusting the reconstruction two superspecialists as the irreproachable former right hand man Eddie Kramer, sound engineering magician, and the biographer / archivist John McDermott. And "People, hell and angels" is, in turn, a disc by historians and specialists, a hoard of snapshots scattered between March 1968 and August 1970, between the first session of study in the United States to return the glories of London and the last months of life, curled in a sequence that favors flow and smoothness criteria in chronological considerations (there is no substance, for that matter, to baste a logical story and unravel a coherent narrative). In the dozen tracks presented on the occasion lurk alternate takes of songs well-known versions of studio pieces, usually captured live and some most curious selection that Hendrix gave the microphone to other items: in "Let me move you" a vibrant r & b to James Brown refers to his early experiences sideman and accompanist, is the saxophonist and old friend Lonnie Youngblood to take a leading role, while "Mojo Man" is a snappy funk soul tacked-style New Orleans vocalist Albert Allen, accompanied by his band and the famous pianist James Booker, recorded at the legendary Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, temple of black music in the '60s, and on which Jimi overdubbed his guitar parts only years later in New York.
"Here my train a comin '," here in electric version, instead belongs to the large group of tracks surfaced several times in live and discs posthumous and controversial as the "Rainbow Bridge", "War Heroes", "Crash Landing", " Midnight Lightning, "" Nine to the Universe "and" Valleys of Neptune "(a sort of twin" People ... "), even though, under the auspices of the Hendrix family, is at least still a risk of those wretched hairpieces assembly of which he was responsible at the time the producer Alan Douglas, author of Frankenstein questionable sound: with one exception due to insurmountable technical problems, what you hear here is what was delivered to the original master, changing from dynamic jam trio with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles muscle during the first steps of Band Of Gypsies, the sextet (with two rhythm guitar and percussion) of Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, training view in Woodstock a couple of weeks later, in the studio, trying to harness the elusive spirit of "Izabella" and Incompiuta "Villanova Junction Blues", meteors precipitated by a new galaxy of music "total" in which the blues and r & b fused with jazz and Latin music. There are sax and organ, there is a straight, dry funk of "Earth Blues", but the heart of the disc are the pieces in trio of post Experience, looking for that "new kind of blues" that Hendrix was experimenting with obstinacy , recreating the music of the masters ("Bleeding Heart" by Elmore James) and chasing ultra sound, between the wah wah roaring of "Somewhere" (with the bass, one of the largest and most memorable pieces in the collection) and only filtered through a Leslie's organ "Inside out" where Jimi pulls out a great riff overdubbing a bass part on the basic track recorded in the company of only Mitch Mitchell on drums.
Insights and ideas taken up again in the most famous songs and has been made, uplifting music with a dignity that even its shape sketched and transient can affect much. The basic question, however, remains as always unanswered crumbs able to indicate the path where Hendrix would have walked if death had not caught early that September 18, 1970 are scattered in the wind, the track seems to reconstruct a ' an impossible and perhaps even unrealistic.
TRACKLIST
"Earth Blues"
"Somewhere"
"Hear my train a comin '"
"Bleeding heart"
"Let me move you"
"Izabella"
"Easy Blues"
"Crash landing"
"Inside out"
"Hey gypsy boy"
"Mojo Man"
"Villanova Junction Blues"
