Montezuma

 

 

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)