Tom has his own view about Jimi. Verlaine: "Hendrix wasn't that particularly adept an orchestrator. Les Paul was a real wizard at it! Hendrix' strengths were his solos. I mean, almost all the tunes on the second record (Axis, Bold As Love) were not great tunes, you know. The first record's a classic. Every cut is a really imaginative riff and a really great solo - and short, really compact! There's some beautiful guitar playing here and there. To my ears there's some real junk on there. After that I don't know much of his stuff except for what they play on the radio once in a while - the space stuff!"
I beg to differ from Tom on the matter of Hendrix's strengths. While his solos were fine, I think an underappreciated aspect, and major strength, of his playing was his phenomenal rhythmic sense - loose and liquid, but always on point. This is one way in which he was a "black" player (and of course he'd played in lots of R&B bands before going solo), and an element that really differentiated him from most other guitar gods of his generation. It's also one of the least imitated aspects of his playing, IMO because it's one of the hardest to imitate.
I'm actually not a major Hendrix fan, but there's some of his work I love. Interestingly, several of my faves are on the album Tom derides, Axis: Little Wing, Castles Made of Sand, and Wait Until Tomorrow.
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