Jimi Hendrix - Cherokee Mist - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

Like I do with many important musicians, my plan is to make a series of albums covering Jimi Hendrix's studio stray tracks. It's been a while, but I've already posted two such albums, covering Hendrix's time with the Experience, from 1967 to early 1969.

This covers the next phase of Hendrix's career, after he broke up the Experience in early 1969 but before he got together with the Band of Gypsys in late 1969. Some songs on my previous Hendrix album with the Experience were recorded as late as April 1969. But before that group broke up he was already occasionally playing with other musicians, so the first songs on this album come from February 1969. I found so much good music from his time before the Band of Gypys that this is the first of two albums from that era, covering the spring and summer of 1969

For most of 1969, Hendrix was somewhat musically lost and looking for a new direction, as well as a new band worthy of him. Nothing from this time period would be officially released until long after his death. He recorded in the studio fairly frequently, but it was more experimenting than aiming to put up a new album.

In two cases, I made some drastic edits that serious Hendrix fans might object to. The first is the song "World Traveler." This song has never been officially released, but the one version known to bootleggers is eight minutes long. For most of the song, Hendrix mostly just played little fills and rhythm guitar while organist Duane Hitchings played riffs and rhythm on his organ without ever really breaking into a solo. There was just one section of the song where Hendrix sang, and two other sections where he played some nice solo guitar work. So I edited the song down to just those three parts, which made it only three minute long.

I did a similar thing with the song "Blue Window." This has been officially released, on the relatively obscure album "Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues - Jimi Hendrix." Unfortunately, that version is 13 minutes long, and most of it was aimless noodling without vocals or impressive instrumental work. So I edited it down to the best six minutes. (By contrast, another song, "It's Too Bad," is also quite long at nine minutes, but I felt the full length was justified.)

The rest of the album comes from various posthumous releases, such as "Blues," "People, Hell and Angels" and "Both Sides of the Sky." In one case ("Things I Used to Do") I used a longer and better version than the officially released one. In order to keep Hendrix's very complicated recording history straight, I've included the dates of each recording and the recording studio used, and added that information to the mp3 tags. All the songs are in chronological order.

By the way, the song "Crash Landing" was the title song of an 1970s Hendrix album produced by Alan Douglas. Rest assured that I've avoided Douglas's misguided production on this version of "Crash Landing" and all other songs on my Hendrix albums. (He had a habit of erasing all instrumentation except Hendrix's and then fleshing the songs out with his own musicians and back-up singers, who had never even met Hendrix.) 

01 World Traveler [Edit] (Jimi Hendrix with Duane Hitchings)
02 It's Too Bad (Jimi Hendrix)
03 Blue Window [Edit] (Jimi Hendrix with Buddy Miles)
04 Cherokee Mist [Instrumental, Sitar Version] (Jimi Hendrix)
05 Mannish Boy - I'm a Man (Jimi Hendrix)
06 Crash Landing [Early Version of Freedom] (Jimi Hendrix)
07 The Things I Used to Do (Jimi Hendrix, Stephen Stills & Johnny Winter)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15119365/JimiH_1967-1968_CherokeeMst_atse.zip.html

I made the cover from a  1968 concert poster designed by Rick Griffin.