Band of Gypsies

Jimi Hendrix

album cover

A New Sound Being Born

Recorded at the Fillmore East in New York on New Year's Eve—the last night of the 1960s—this is Jimi Hendrix tearing out toward a bold new kind of mind-warp. He'd exhausted the possibilities of the conventional verse-chorus song context (see Are You Experienced), and as the new decade dawned, the former paratrooper and his newly assembled "black" band—the drummer Buddy Miles and bassist Billy Cox—sought different horizons. This trio was not tiptoeing to get there: It was into the hard and the harsh. The group's wide-open vamps were often built on static single chords, some leaning toward the shadowy landscapes of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, some with the kinetic thump of Sly Stone funk.

With Hendrix, the starting point doesn't matter much—a few minutes into any of these pieces, he's off in the ether, giving guitar clinics for contortionists. Band of Gypsys just might be the heaviest explosion of electric guitar prowess ever caught on tape—these writhing, screaming, bent-over-backward solos are works of herculean imagination. At the same time, the album is one of the most thrilling glimpses of a new sound being born. Hendrix wasn't exactly sure where he was going, and neither were his cohorts. They knew the general terrain, and knew how to support Hendrix when he stepped into the spotlight, but the "form" was mostly free. Hendrix being Hendrix, there were no road maps, and the group hadn't been playing together enough to have developed protocol. That created its own blank-slate energy: Listen as the stuttering funk of "Machine Gun" progresses, and you'll hear the band follow Hendrix first at close range, then with less note-by-note attention. As he builds up steam, the pulse behind him becomes brutally physical, a whomp that registers in the gut.

Band of Gypsys contains material that Hendrix was just working up at the time—these are the definitive recordings of "Who Knows," "Message to Love," and "Machine Gun," among others. It's the only live album Hendrix authorized, and though the Band itself was short-lived (Hendrix dissolved it several weeks after this show), Band of Gypsys remains a once-in-a-lifetime explosion of cosmic guitar.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1970, Capitol
Key Tracks: "Message to Love," "Machine Gun," "Who Knows," "Power of Soul"
F.Y.I.: Hendrix produced this album under the pseudonym "Heaven Research."
Catalog Choice: Axis: Bold as Love
Next Stop: Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire
After That: The Allman Brothers Band: At Fillmore East
Book Pages: 356–357