Next year will see the release of a new Jimi Hendrix album, according to the guitarist’s official website.
There’s no need to rush and check your calendar’s dates or seek out any local Doctor Emmett Brown types however – the twelve previously unreleased songs were recorded in 1968 and 1969 and are only now, 42 years on from his passing, being made available for fans to buy and enjoy.
Rolling Stone yesterday revealed the artwork for the new collection, entitled People, Hell and Angels, which includes material for the album Hendrix was working on before his death.
While it is thought by some that the tracks may have been originally intended for First Days Of The New Rising Sun, a proposed double-LP follow-up to Electric Ladyland, much of the album’s material has already been released on 1971’s The Cry of Sun, 1972’s War Heroes and a 1997 release under the same title.
The late guitar icon’s website describes the soon-to-be-available songs as departures from his previous work with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, taking “new, experimental directions”. Talking to US radio station KISW, his sister, Janine said “he was trying to create this new sound … He was bringing all these instruments like he did at Woodstock.”
She also compared the new style of these divergent tracks to the sound of one of the 70’s most popular fusion bands: “The way he was describing it in 1969 was what Earth, Wind and Fire became … that’s what we would have had: richer, bigger bands with more sounds and more cultures. There would have been a definite evolution.”
So far only a USA release date has been announced for March 5 2013.
Cinemas and DVD players will soon be graced by fresh Jimi Hendrix material too, with the release of a new biopic imminent and his legendary set from Woodstock in 1969 out later this month.
On November 29 the Hendrix biographical will be shown at more than 30 screens across the UK in celebration of what would have been his 70th birthday.