Play Hendrix
Sleeve notes to the album 'Play Hendrix' Album Review by Chris Parker Ron E. Carter has never been a man to shirk a challenge. Just before his debut album, Ad Idem, was released in 1997, Carter was rushed into hospital for emergency laser surgery on the one “good eye” left him after a car accident twenty years previously. Undaunted, he went ahead with the album launch as planned, commenting: “My musical development charts my personal journey through life and my triumph over those constraints that have inhibited freedom of expression.” Exposure to the explosive creative force apparent throughout this, Carter’s second album, will convince even the most jaded listener that the Kent-based guitarist’s struggle has been thoroughly vindicated. Carter’s struggle to find a niche for himself in the overcrowded jazz/fusion scene of the late 1990s, and his emergence from the mêlée with a fast-growing reputation among an ever-widening circle of admirers, closely parallels the initially slow and grudging, but now almost universal acknowledgement of Jimi Hendrix’s genius among jazz players and aficionados. The American guitarist’s work found immediate favour with the open-eared - Gil Evans and Miles Davis most prominent among them - but, even as late as 1989, jazz guitarist Barney Kessel could still quite confidently assert that Hendrix’s music was “fakery and charlatanism”. It took a new generation of jazz guitarists, raised during the electric blues and rock boom of the 1950s and 1960s and thus able to hear Hendrix’s music in context, to appreciate the extraordinary virtuosity and power of the man, and to assimilate and emulate his technical innovations. John Scofield is one such: “Hendrix added a new dimension, but it’s still essentially blues. I really love his playing, just as I have a real thing for Albert King, B. B. King and Muddy Waters.” Bill Frisell is another: “For me, Hendrix is still brand-new. His stuff really held up.” Now Ron E. Carter has added his name to this growing list of admirers with this stunning album. To play rock music - especially rock with the raw power of Hendrix material - is deceptively easy; the music has always attracted more than its fair share of air-guitar-playing poseurs. To play it well, so that subtlety coexists with its inherent vitality and energy, requires considerable musicianship, and jazz musicians - Mike Stern and John Abercrombie in the USA, Tony Rémy and Ron E. Carter in the UK, to name just four - have managed to combine the visceral punch of rock with the imaginative improvisational fluidity of jazz to great effect in the last decade. On this album, Carter brings all the versatility and technical prowess routinely associated with jazz - his first musical love, closely followed by rock and blues - to bear on nine Hendrix compositions and three originals in the great man’s style. Overlying his jazz musician’s sensitivity to the possibilities of a good chord-sequence, however, is a natural propensity to go for the thrilling climax, to sustain the musical excitement via a breathless rush of ideas, by resorting to the extremes of textural variety and blistering energy that Hendrix made his hallmark in his tragically brief but extraordinarily influential career. Carter’s guitar soars, screams, plunges and stutters as Hendrix’s did, and he also thrillingly emulates Hendrix’s trademark ability to play rhythm and lead parts simultaneously, but - as he demonstrates on an intriguing arrangement of “Voodoo Chile” - he also brings a great deal of himself to the mix. In his attempts to infuse Hendrix’s material with a twenty-first-century sensibility, Carter is flawlessly assisted by two of the UK’s finest musicians: bassist Mike Mondesir and drummer/pianist Gary Husband. Neither will need any introduction to any moderately observant jazz listener; each has been something of a fixture on the late-twentieth-century UK scene, the former frequently heard in tandem with his drummer-brother Mark, the latter often seen with such luminaries as Allan Holdsworth and (mainly as a keyboard player) Billy Cobham in addition to leading his own trio, and to Carter’s project they bring all their customary flexibility, forcefulness and control. Above all, though, they bring clearly discernible enthusiasm for Hendrix’s material to the project; the album, while imbued with love and respect for its dedicatee’s music, sounds like the result of serious fun in the studio, and such enjoyment is powerfully infectious. “The '90s Hendrix”, on the evidence of this deeply-felt, joyous tribute to one of the last century’s greatest musicians, looks set to be hailed as “the twenty-first-century Hendrix”.
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