Progressive Rock

Yes, I Am Experienced: the 2026 Jimi Hendrix Memorial Piece

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I worry some that I’m shorting my appreciated audience its rations of expected poetry, what with the recent series of poorly received short Dadaist French translations – but if there’s one thing guaranteed when working in this self-managed Project it’s that I can go where chance and mood takes me. For those wondering if I’ve left more conventional poetry behind, I ask for a short dose of patience – I have variety in my soul, and I’ll be back to that soon.

But not today. Today this thing where Music and Words Meet will be about words meeting music.

Almost every year this century I’ve taken to noting the anniversary of the death of the American musician Jimi Hendrix. Initially it simply meant that on the morning of September 18th I’d plug in an electric guitar, turn the amp up loud, and play.* When the Parlando Project started in 2016 I began to publish some of those recordings memorializing Hendrix each September.

I’ve been thinking recently about an aspect of that decade called The Sixties.™ There was over its ten-year allotment (which carried over into the decade where a lot of what we think of as The Sixties™ happened, the merely The Seventies) an increasing appeal and practice of freedom in music. I believe this started first in Jazz.** Bebop liked to see how free one could be within ever more finely woven harmonic frameworks, which tempts one to point this out as a metaphor for the Afro-American experience. How expressive can you be though constrained? But as The Sixties™ approached, a new thing was coming into Jazz. No one worked too hard on what to call it: it was called “Free Jazz.”

A number of things happened within this expanding freedom, often all at once – in practice, decidedly all at once – harmonic structures were relaxed, no more making the rapid chord changes; improvisation became not just the rule of the featured solos, but the rule of entire compositions, and more than one musician could be soloing at once, even musicians in the “rhythm section;” allowed instrumental expression and articulations were expanded every which way into sounds that would have been considered defects in technique or propriety; and song length became limited only by the endurance of fiery young musicians.

Such endurance and allowance didn’t extend to audiences. Many of the practitioners of Free Jazz never knew substantial audiences that extended beyond fellow musicians of the same movement – but two who had achieved audiences took different paths through this freedom. One was Miles Davis, but I must leave him out for lack of time.

The other was John Coltrane, and this month it’s the centenary of Coltrane’s birth. As I worked on my annual Hendrix memorial I thought of this other great artist, one whose life can be properly studied like the lives of saints without inappropriateness. Coltrane did not start out as a young phenom. He was a perfectly average saxophonist in an age where there were many, many others, and like others in his era, heroin addiction tampered his resources early in his career. Somehow his dedication to his craft survived this, and even among his most ardent contemporaries, his study and practice regimen was legendary. By the late Fifties he could write and perform structures like “Giant Steps,”  a set of abrupt, up-tempo, leaping chord changes that he would arpeggiate over – a task to challenge any post-BeBop Jazz player to the upmost.

Coltrane also made music with a popular footprint. He was featured on the most popular Jazz LP of all time, the Miles Davis Quintet’s Kind of Blue,  and with his own quartet his revolutionary, yet popular, reconception of the Broadway tune “My Favorite Things” sold well and became a juke-box staple.

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”  was Free Jazz adjacent, so that performance’s popularity with audiences was another achievement. Coltrane was the featured soloist on it and the chord changes were now sparce (as were the charts on the Kind of Blue  LP), but the quartet’s rhythm section stayed in a catchy Jazz waltz groove on that record. Performing live around this time, Coltrane would feature fellow genius improviser Eric Dolphy, They might solo simultaneously and unleash extended articulations – outright Free Jazz in all its general audience baffling ways. As The Sixties™ continued, Coltrane increased the freedom in his work, live and on record. More soloists, extended rhythm sections sometime doubling bass and drums who were also freed to solo or extend themselves from strict time-keeping. This didn’t help Coltrane maintain his audience, but soon enough he was dying of liver disease, expiring during the “Summer of Love” in 1967. One of his last popular LPs was also among the last with the simpler Quartet, 1965’s “A Love Supreme.” “A Love Supreme”  is one of the most overtly spiritual albums in history, and Coltrane seemed unconcerned that his devotion to extending musical freedom should bow to commercial expectations.

Winds of Change LP cover

OK, what’s this LP cover doing in a post about Free Jazz, John Coltrane, and Jimi Hendrix?

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Now if Free Jazz wasn’t topping record charts or filling large venues, that didn’t mean it wasn’t impacting popular music, by way of musicians appreciating musicians. In general, rock musicians weren’t Jazz musicians in theoretical knowledge or technical skills, but this call for musical freedom became quite broad in The Sixties™. I’m going to short change that history today, but rock musicians were listening to Jazz, and wanted to try to take part in this kind of Free Jazz expression.***

Which brings us to two rock musicians: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon. Not a natural pairing it might seem, but a close one none-the-less. Eric Burdon was the lead singer of the Animals, a northern England R&B band with soul-Jazz tinges, that by 1966 had reformulated themselves as Eric Burdon and The New Animals – the new DBA designed to escape the clutches of a shady and money-skimming manager named Mike Jeffery. This new group was going to play “progressive rock,” the name I would have called the sort of Rock groups who wanted longer pieces with more expressionist soloing.****

Through a convoluted but happy set of accidents, that year the going-nowhere American Hendrix was taken to England by the now obsolete Old Animals bass player, Chas Chandler. If Chandler was tired of being screwed over by managers, he decided what he would do is become one – a supportive, musician centered one – and with Hendrix he could see the potential to make a ragamuffin couch-surfing Afro-American R&B player who loved Bob Dylan lyrics and SciFi into a going commercial concern.

Which he did. Alas, he needed front money to establish even a stripped-back power trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience designed to launch Hendrix, and Chandler had to enlist his old devil Jeffery to get that cash. Over the next 3-4 years of a Jimi Hendrix career we now remember, Chandler’s role diminished and Jeffery’s role expanded – but in the winter of ’66-’67 Chandler’s old lead singer Burdon and his new band was hip to the idea of this new force Hendrix, and they concocted a tribute to Jimi and musical freedom to close the first side of their first LP, a short yet expansive jam they titled “Yes, I Am Experienced.”  I wondered how soon after Hendrix had released his first LP with the song “Are You Experienced?”  and a result says Burdon released his “answer record” before the Hendrix cut – but I heard them in the correct order.

Back then I liked the Animals. I liked Eric Burdon and the New Animals as much, but there are elements about them that might be, well, embarrassing. Burdon was one of those ecstatic converts familiar to religious movements, all-in on what they understood about this upcoming Summer of Love, psychedelia in drugs and art, free love – and yes, this Free Jazz inspired expansion of musical arrangements and expression. So much so, that he embarrassed some acolytes of these things even in The Sixties™!

And so it was that Burdon’s lyrics on “Yes, I Am Experienced”   have a mixture of enraptured naivete and cringe. Back in The Sixties™, I can remember my eventual LYL and Parlando musical partner Dave Moore finding Burdon’s performance there a tad pretentious,***** while liking the new band on the record, particularly guitarist/violinist/sitarist Vic Briggs.

So, for the 2026 version of my Jimi Hendrix memorial, I’m releasing this recording which adapts a few words from Burdon about Hendrix, but it’s mostly about taking the electric guitar and getting on with playing long solos using that instrument’s expressive colors, despite not being a John Coltrane.

I laid down the bass part with my Jack Casaday bass, using the melodic line there to inform the harmonic scheme for a vibraphone track. Then I picked up a somewhat problematic Telecaster that’s in my studio space, one that has a very noisy P90 neck pickup. Undaunted by buzzing from the single coil pickups plugged into a considerably overdriven amplifier, I played a one-pass freely expressive solo extending for nearly 9 minutes. It’s not really in Jimi Hendrix’s style, or Vic Briggs’ either. Perhaps it’s my style? Well, playing for 9 minutes you have to be somebody. I misremembered some of what Burdon went on about in his recording praising Hendrix, but I yelped out an adaptation of part of his lyrics, while the music has nothing to do with what the New Animals recorded in the winter of ’66-67.

What you can hear with the audio player below is less than 4 minutes of that, a foreshortened “single version” that fades out less than half-way in. If I have the time, I may indulge the full-length “album version” release a bit later. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own player.

The initial point of these annual exercises was to use Hendrix as an example to memorialize musical creators – to do this, however imperfectly with my musical limitations, because I’m alive and can do what I can do when they no longer can do such in a present moment – to notice, to underline, to pay attention to that, to feel it in my body. This is like what I try to do for the dead poets here other days: to bring them inside myself, a living being.

In point of fact, Eric Burdon is still alive. The evening before Jimi Hendrix died in a London flat after taking too-strong European formulary sleeping pills, he showed up at a gig in London with Burdon and his then new in 1970 group, one called War. Yes, the War who would put out sublime chill Latin-funk songs later in the merely Seventies. Eric, unlikely that you’re in the hardy audience here that indulges poetry and varied music, but this is the second or third time I’ve tipped my hat to you in this Project. I think you influenced me, though of course not as a convincing singer, but (oddly enough) as being naïve enough to do this anyway.

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*This became easy for me to do after the death of my wife – no one to disturb. It’s become harder to do in the past couple of years – more folks who can be disturbed.

**As I wrote this, I thought: did avant garde orchestral-instrument art music do this first? As Andrew Hickey’s Law has it, “There’s No First of Anything,” but my casual thought on this was that a great deal of the “classical music avant garde” (yes, this sort of oxymoron was used) was focused on abstracted and system music in the mid-century. Yes, rules were broken and discarded, but often new rules or procedures for chance were brought in. Those designed abstractions might challenge audiences as much as Free Jazz did, but Free Jazz did it from what seemed to listeners as too much indulgence in unfettered human expression.

***Examples of direct influence: the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”  is a loose adaptation of Coltrane and Eric Dolphy’s live recording “India.”  Highly underrated drummer John Densmore of The Doors often speaks of how the John Coltrane Quartet drummer Elvin Jones’ example showed him how to ground freer soloists without constraining them. Other rock drummers of this era, including Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, used Jones as a model.

****Let’s be careful around music nerds: not to be confused with Prog Rock, a name generally given to bands as The Seventies dawned who were more influenced by European orchestral instrument composers than the American Jazz influenced bands of The Sixties™. Of course, these two things intermixed, but we must maintain distinctions!

*****The song’s fade out, as Burdon essays the “Good Morning Little School Girl”/”Sweet Little 16”  trope of rock stars having sex with presumably underage girls is particularly objectionable. As a horny young man when the LP came out, I’m not sure I can claim retrospective acknowledgement of the power imbalances there so much as remembering the unintentionally comic idea of Burdon, a great singer without ever being able to sustain the erotic charisma of others of his era as an irresistible love god. Yes, there’s real harm in real life in such conceptions, but the aura of Bottom with the asses head in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream  was unavoidable.

I listen to the Temptations last great record and think of Charles Stepney

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Don’t worry, we’ll be back with more audio pieces soon. Ironically, some of the interval right now in new music is because I’m working on experimenting, organizing and recording a bit this month. There’s always plenty to hear in the archives here, if that’s what you came for. Listenership seems to go down on the weekends anyway, so let me dance about architecture and talk about music this time.

This week I was driving, and the radio station where I used to work played the Temptations “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”  A driveway moment ensued. I probably hadn’t heard this record in years, perhaps decades, but I heard it plenty when it came out in 1972. That was back in a time before the death of the Top 40 radio format, a once popular but now oddball idea, where radio stations played a wide variety of music constrained by a tight playlist that repeated the same songs often enough that they imprinted on listeners. Radio formats still do the repetition, but such variety of genres would be considered commercial suicide now. Here’s a link to a list of the most popular songs of that year, the kind of songs you’d hear right before and after “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,”  but it may be meaningless now to those who don’t know them. Take my word for it, schlock and genius (sometimes in the same song) in a mix of genres that would never have anything to do with each other in later years.

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone”  doesn’t have to apologize for itself, it puts the needle-gauge over against the genius pin and keeps it stuck there for the entire piece. It’s a great performance. The Temptations, a vocal group, reportedly didn’t care for it because long portions of the record are instrumentally focused, but it’s a great group vocal performance none-the-less, with each singer getting to play a character not just a harmony singing register. As a listener though, what captured me then and now was the musical setting. The single was nearly 7 minutes. And it’s 7 minutes that never leaves the mono-chord minor groove and is through-composed featuring a prominent electric bass ostinato, spare trap drums and strings by moonlighting Detroit Symphony Orchestra players. Besides the voices, electric guitar and a heavily modified trumpet that sounds more like a modern synth patch than a real trumpet step forward and drop back.

 

Dancing on your grave: that slow, ominous groove confronts even the Soul Train dancers with a new problem

 

Listening to it again, enraptured by the instrumental arrangement, I thought, “This sounds remarkably like some of the stuff I do for the Parlando Project!” Please excuse that thought. I wasn’t thinking “I can play as good as those guys.” I try, but what I mean is that compositionally I’m often working the same concepts. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”  was arranged by Paul Riser, whose name I had to look up. Listed composers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong may have had input, particularly on the vocal melodies and of course the memorable lyrics, but musically when you’ve got what is essentially a one-chord vamp, I’d look to the arranger for those tasty colors.

So, here’s this arrangement, this set of timbres, demonstrated in a highly popular single from more than 45 years ago, that I continue to exploit from time to time here—but that’s not where I first got the idea. For that I must step back to another man, even more obscure than Whitfield and Strong, as unknown as Paul Riser: Charles Stepney.

Charles Stepney was a genius of tonal and timbral color who worked extensively in pop music genres. One reason that you haven’t heard of him is that when you work in pop music genres and aren’t held responsible for hits you tend to disappear. Unlike “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”  I can’t point to a Charles Stepney record that many of a generation would remember instantly on mention. I knew Stepney most from his work with an equally obscure Chicago group of the Sixties and early Seventies: Rotary Connection.

If you were to listen to Rotary Connection albums today (they appear to be available on leading streaming services) your personal schlock/genius meter may waver from cut to cut. Particularly on the cuts from the Sixties, there are elements that sound like a soundtrack composer trying to portray “hippie-dippy sh*t.” In some instances, I’m not sure that Stepney wasn’t trying to signal just that, intentionally, as part of an extended collage of elements as Frank Zappa would do around the same time. Other times, what could be considered outré elements, “exotica” sounds of the quiet-village sort, need to be heard with an open mind and in the context of the whole presentation. Also in his Sixties work with Rotary Connection, there’s a fascination with extreme vocal effects, greatly aided by Rotary Connection singer Minnie Ripperton, who was asked to use her extraordinary vocalese techniques during those earlier records. You may find that strange, even off-putting, or a waste of a perfectly good voice that could be used in a more conventional soul-music style.

 

Problematic miming-to-an-early-record clip. Co-lead singer Sidney Barnes is hidden in the back, and the third lead singer Judy Hauff * had left the band. Worse yet, the TV host has a mansplaining moment with Minnie Ripperton.

 

Rotary Connection sometimes (like those Motown Whitfield/Strong productions) gets labeled “Psychedelic Soul.” Rotary Connection sometimes self-labeled itself as “Progressive Soul.” Interestingly, over in England the idea of combining 20th Century orchestral concepts and extended timbres with rock band instruments was a coming thing. It would get called, succeed as for a time, and then be filed on record shelves as “Progressive Rock.” Fashionable, then unfashionable, now something that one can experience without the danger of it taking over too much musical attention.

A contemporary arranger with some similarities, David Axlerod, has gathered a tiny bit of 21st century notice that has largely escaped Stepney. Even given Axlerod’s use of William Blake texts, I prefer Stepney. Perhaps that can be laid to my listening to Stepney’s work with Rotary Connection as well as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf** when these records were new, and I was young and ready to be imprinted. In this rare interview from 1970, Stepney sounds at times like Quincy Jones (although I wonder if the Downbeat interviewer may be an influence in that). If Stepney had relocated from Chicago to LA, closer to the heart of the post-1970 record business, could he have had a more Quincy Jones career?

His use of orchestra colors (like Riser, he used available symphony players, this time from the Chicago Symphony) combined with rock band instrumentation is what I admired, then and now. In the studio some of the rock band parts were played by Chicago jazz guys, both soul jazz types like Phil Upchurch and more outside cats like Pete Cosey. The combinations he composed aren’t really like anyone else’s—and different often makes demands on listeners to listen differently, and without preconceptions.

What happened to Stepney? He died young. He had just turned 45 in 1976, and—heart attack. He was starting to work with an upcoming group of jazz to soul players who also saw an opening in the Progressive Rock concept for longer pieces with more colors (yes, melanin pun intended). It might have been hippie-dippy to call themselves after their astrological signs: Earth Wind and Fire.

 

 

*although I focus today on Stepney’s instrumental arrangements, this unknown band had three outstanding vocalists: Ripperton is the best known; but Sidney Barnes was an arranger too, interested in expanding the soul-singer’s techniques, and Judy Hauff? She became a force in the shape-note hymn singing revival later in the 20th century, composing and arranging pieces for harmony choirs.

**although not orchestral, and I suspect less under Stepney’s direction, these two records(Electric Mud  and The Howlin’ Wolf Album)  by the Blues’ greats used some of the same jazz and rock musicians as were used on the Rotary Connection records. Reviews were almost entirely negative at the time. (TLDNR: sacrilege due to idiotic pandering to the hippies) Eventually, a handful of listeners heard the intent by younger Afro-American musicians to do something different with the tradition, as opposed to a mistake by crass marketers. The cover of the Wolf album was just this text: “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either.” My opinion: like many experimental works, not everything works, but when it does, something new happens.