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Jimi Hendrix music biography continued...

re-named James Marshall Hendrix) on November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix received his first guitar, an electric one, at age 15. Completely self-taught, he started playing with the local R&B acts on the chitlin circuit. During the early and mid-'60s, Hendrix worked with such R&B/soul greats as Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, and King Curtis, and started to gain a reputation as a musician who could coax unforeseen sounds out of his guitar using innovative amplification techniques. Hoping to strike out on his own, Hendrix moved to New York in the mid-sixties, where he was discovered and convinced to move to London and record a solo album, fronting a band that would be called the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They recorded Are You Experienced? and Hendrix never looked back.
A guitar virtuoso who used such innovative devices as the wah wah pedal, feedback solos and distorted riffs, was also a tremendous songwriter and singer, on par with Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Astonishingly, however, Hendrix would only record three fully conceived studio albums in his lifetime. Axis: Bold as Love and the double-LP Electric Ladyland were more scattered and experimental than Are You Experienced? On Electric Ladyland in particular, Hendrix pioneered the use of the studio itself as a recording instrument, manipulating electronics and devising overdub techniques (with the help of engineer Eddie Kramer in particular) to plot uncharted musical territory.
The final two years of Hendrix's life were tumultuous ones musically, financially, and personally. He was embroiled in enough complicated management and record company disputes (some dating from ill-advised contracts he'd signed before the Experience formed) to keep the legal establishment busy for years. Hendrix disbanded his backup and reformed them several times as he was pushed in different directions by his fellow musicians, management and record company executives. Coming up on two years after Electric Ladyland, a new studio album had yet to appear, although Hendrix was recording constantly during the period. Nobody knew what musical direction Hendrix was going to take in the late sixties, least of all Hendrix himself. He'd been working intermittently on a new album, tentatively titled First Ray of the New Rising Sun, when he died in London on September 18, 1970, from drug-related complications. Yet, Hendrix left behind a rock 'n roll legacy that has yet to be challenged.