There are musicians who are technically excellent. Who have developed, through thousands of hours of practice and study, a mastery of their instrument that allows them to perform at a consistently high level across a wide range of material. This is admirable. This is the product of dedication and discipline and the specific kind of love that expresses itself through repetition.
And then there is whatever Jimi Hendrix was. Which was not the same thing at all.
The people who worked with Hendrix in recording studios — the engineers, the producers, the session musicians who occupied the same professional spaces — have spent the decades since his death trying to describe what it was like to watch him work. The interviews accumulate and across all of them, through different voices and different framings, certain things appear consistently. One of them is the speed of his processing. The speed at which he heard something new and absorbed it and made it his.
The session in question was in London, late 1960s. A musician — a guitarist of considerable accomplishment — had been working on a piece for several weeks. A complex thing, not easily categorized, sitting somewhere between rock and jazz and blues with a chord structure that the musicians who had tried to play along with it had found difficult to navigate. The person who wrote it had brought it to the studio to continue developing it and had not expected or particularly wanted an audience.
Hendrix arrived. He was not there for that session — he was there for something else, something scheduled later in the evening — and he came in early and sat in the corner with the quiet self-contained quality he often had when he was in listening mode.
He heard the piece once. The full run-through, with all its complexity, all its unusual transitions, all the places where the harmony moved in ways that confounded conventional expectation.
Then he picked up a guitar.
The engineer, telling this story years later, said that his first instinct was to tell Hendrix that this wasn’t the right moment — that the session was still in progress, that the writer might not want someone sitting in without invitation. He didn’t say it. He has said since that something in the way Hendrix picked up the guitar stopped the words in his throat.
What happened next is the part that everyone who was present agrees on completely and nobody who hears it secondhand entirely believes. Hendrix played the piece back. From the beginning. With the chord structure intact, with the transitions in their correct places, with additions and elaborations that improved on the original in ways that the writer — who was standing six feet away with his mouth open — immediately recognized as better than what he had written.
One hearing. First try. No mistakes.
The writer stood there for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, that Hendrix could keep whatever he had just added because it belonged there more than the original material did.
That is the only story you need to explain why, fifty years after his death, no honest guitarist in the world will tell you they’ve fully figured out what Jimi Hendrix was doing. Because what he was doing was not entirely located in technique. It was located somewhere that technique alone cannot reach. It was located in whatever it is that makes certain human beings able to hear the music that already exists inside a sound before anyone else in the room has found it.
He found it every time. First try. Every time.