Buddy Guy in the US has stronger parallels with Jimmy Page in the UK. Both were well-respected studio session men who spent a lot of years making other people sound good on record before they got to step into the spotlight on their own. Neither Jimi nor Stevie had as much of that kind of background.
Stevie's early style was reminiscent of the Texas bluesmen that his brother Jimmy would have introduced him to. Johnny Winter comes to mind, for one. Blazing riffs driven home with ferocious intensity. Then he spread his horizons to include influences like Buddy Guy, still running wild and fast, with a nod to Jimi Hendrix along the way. Before he died, he was moving closer to mentors like Albert King, who schooled him in the tasteful distinction between flash and trash. Not a matter of slowing down, but being more selective about which notes to play; being more willing to leave out notes that didn't have to be there. You gotta wonder. With his eagerness to learn, his work ethic, his dedication, and his immense talent.... what did we never get to hear?
That could just as fittingly be said of Jimi Hendrix. Players who grow up listening to all the stuff that happened after Jimi just can't comprehend how drastically, dramatically,
devastatingly different he was. From
anybody else on the planet! Every player pays homage to his predecessors, whether they want to or not. The roots show. And Hendrix's music was based in stuff we could all identify, or at least recognise as sounding familiar. And then it would take these amazing, death-defying leaps into space, like a fast car blowing through the guardrails on a mountain road, and
not falling into the valley below. Before Jimi, there was music. Some of it had guitars in it. There was even stuff you say was guitar music, because playing it on other instruments wouldn't sound quite right. Jimi brought forth guitar
soundscapes - sonic visions that scrambled our senses, and completely re-wrote our concepts of what a guitar was, and what could be done with it. By the time he played "Machine Gun" with Band Of Gypsys, he was turning that raw, elemental force into the kind of focused expressiveness that had jazz greats like Miles Davis looking to hook up with him. You gotta wonder. With his eagerness to learn, his work ethic, his dedication, and his immense talent.... what did we never get to hear?
Lordathestrings
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