Jimi Hendrix never died.
After Band of Gypsies in 1970, he retreats to
the studio and produces two modest albums supported by selective stints of
short touring. There are hints of something secret, something great, but the guitarist is silent for 18 months. Then, in 1975, he releases his second double album, Montezuma,
to critical and commercial success. It quickly goes on to become one of the
most influential albums of all time, mentioned in the same sentences with Sgt
Pepper, Pet Sounds, and just about anything Bob Dylan or the Rolling
Stones are putting out.
It is, in fact, more than a rock album. It is also
more than a jazz or “jazz fusion” album. It is simply the next generation of electric
guitar music, welding all facets of rock and jazz with nearly everything that
had come before. Musicologists find hints of Bachian fugues, echoes of the masterful
intricacies of Mozart and the sturm und drang of a mature Beethoven, an
orchestra translated through the fingers upon an electric guitar in a multitrack
recording studio.
Montezuma revolutionizes
music and the music industry. And this soon overflows pop culture and the zeitgeist.
The album is the impetus for a generation of young and hungry musicians to
push the boundaries of music and expand into newer, unimagined and previously
unimaginable terrain. That revolt-against-rock, punk, does happen, but it is muted
into extreme niche-dom. The 80s synth style does not, alas, happen. Nor does
the phenomenon of the “hair band,” though heavy metal does develop, but more
like a weed choking in a garden of impossibilities. Rap does not evolve, nor
does the materialism, sexual immorality, and violence typically associated with
the genre.
Instead, Hendrix becomes the spiritual father of a new
type of music. Along with the synthesis of baroque, classical, and romantic
ideas and motifs, hundreds of his musical offspring explode and branch out,
hydra-like, fractal-like, toward new and higher peaks, leaving nothing
unturned, unexplored, unchallenged. Since the ultimate foundation of music is
mathematics, time signatures segue into more intricate expansions: exponential
time signatures, time signatures based
on pi, imaginary (i) time signatures. The studio becomes a
laboratory of infinite possibility. Fugues with several hundred tracks of
interplaying guitar lines, chords, melodies, harmonics, become commonplace. Revolutionary
advancement in electronics and computers drives it further onward and upward.
Forward-masking, backward-masking, multi-dimensional masking.
The guitar itself evolves. At first, some physical
changes – eight- and ten-string guitars, guitars with bass strings added,
guitars where the body and neck can change length and shape, mid-song,
to mold new sounds. A guitar is patched into a board and sent to a next
generation Cray computer where the data is scrambled, rescrambled, and deconstructed
based on complex mathematical notation and fed back through a Marshall cabinet.
The most cutting edge guitarsmanship features that which is neurally-linked
directly into and through the musician’s mind.
And in spite of all this, the music is, inexplicably, listenable.
Because September 18, 1970, was a relatively uneventful
day in the life of Jimi Hendrix, the maestro brings peace, love and understanding
to the world by the third decade of the twenty-first century.
(thoughts while showering this morning, May
11, 2024)
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