Album reviewElectric Lady Studios, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, is inextricably linked with Jimi Hendrix, for obvious reasons. In 1968, Hendrix and his manager purchased the Generation, a short-lived nightclub that replaced the Village Barn, a club that had operated in the Eighth Street location for nearly 40 years. The idea was to resuscitate the site to its former glory as a night spot, but one more attuned to the predilections of the late '60s zeitgeist.
Of course, many a rock star has gone broke trying to underwrite an ongoing party, so Hendrix's business managers convinced him that a recording studio would be a better—and more financially dependable—use of the space. With the now-iconic studio architect John Storyk working alongside Hendrix and Eddie Kramer, the nightclub was gutted and transformed—after many months of delays—into a modern recording studio designed to Hendrix's standards, which put a premium on comfort and technical innovation. Electric Lady was at the vanguard of "semi-residential" studios—facilities that gave artists time and space to ignore the outside world and stretch out creatively and collaboratively—that would become popular throughout the '70s. Ironically, none of studio albums released during Hendrix's lifetime were recorded in Electric Lady.
Hendrix settled in for a couple of months as construction was wrapping up, with an eye to getting started on the follow-up to Electric Ladyland. It was a transitional period, with Hendrix moving away from psychedelic rock and into something more soulful and improvisational; it was also a wildly prolific time. Even though he was only able to work for about 10 weeks, he filled nearly every hour of that time developing material. While substantial amounts of this material was mixed (some under Hendrix's supervision) and released on posthumous collections like The Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and War Heroes in the '70s, and, again in more "faithful" final versions on '90s sets like First Rays of the New Rising Sun, dozens of hours of recordings has, remarkably, remained unreleased. This set brings together quite a bit of that material, with a focus on raw and raucous jams featuring bassist Billy Cox and drummer Mitch Mitchell. While nearly everything on this expansive collection could be defined as "embryonic" and far from final (the two takes of "Drifter's Escape" are chatty and loose, barely registering as "songs"), hearing Hendrix and his band work through this material is both revelatory and invigorating.
Even at his most meandering, Hendrix always seemed to be working around or toward an idea, as evidenced by a cut like "The Long Medley." Here, he’s teasing, testing, and tossing around ideas that would eventually work their way into five different songs; it makes for fascinating listening to hear a genius at work, but it's also—thanks to Cox and Mitchell—a solid, groove-oriented workout. To be clear, every single song on this set is better represented by their "final" versions, but if these lean, muscular jams were the only recordings available of these songs, they would still register as top-tier work.
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Jason Ferguson/Qobuz 
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