Cherokee Missed: PBS American Masters Documentary on Jimi Hendrix Less-than- Definitive.

Re: American Masters | Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin' | PBS Video

"The definitive film about the legendary rock musician, Jimi Hendrix."

 

I just viewed the new ( and much overdue) American Masters documentary about Jimi Hendrix. It was a good film, and contained a lot of new footage & interviews with friends and fellow musicians. But it had the same oversight that most docs and biopics of the man do: it overlooked his aboriginal ancestry, and the crucial influence that spending a part of his childhood with his Cherokee Indian grandmother in Vancouver had on his outlook, composing and playing. It isn't just that his first album contained an ode to the American Indian (I Don't Live Today), his second album a signature ballad that he referred to as an "Indian thing" (Little Wing) or that these references run throughout his music (Voodoo Chile, Cherokee Mist). What he gets from his indigenous background is an entire naturalist metaphysic that informs both his playing and his composing and the deep organic connection between them.

 

 

I also thought that interviewing some blues, jazz and classical musicians (BB King, JOhn McLaughlin/Gil Evans/ miles Davis, Nigel Kennedy) would have brought to light the truly universal aspects of Hendrix's music in a way that still is a little under-appreciated. That mixture of African-American, aboriginal and Whitebread Seattle was the perfect crucible for everything that was current in American popular music and culture up to that time. John McLaughlin simply referred to Hendrix's music as "contemporary music".--as perfect synthesis of blues, jazz R&B and rock as you'll ever find, bound together in part by the sounds of nature.

 

And why did the film seem to treat his manager, Michael Jeffrey, so kindly? Drummer Buddy Miles has said that "Jimi would still be alive if it weren't for that son of a bitch". Rumours have swirled that Hendrix had his acid spiked deliberately by Jeffrey in order to sabotage the Band of Gypsys ( his all-black band). I even read that Jeffrey had Hendrix kidnapped so that Jeffrey could "save" him, and then leverage that gratitude into a renewed (all-white ) Experience. A truly definitive film would have examined the blame usually attributed to Jeffrey for Hendrix's condition at the time of his death. It also would have hired a musical consultant like Charles Schaar Murray (whose book about Hendrix--Crosstown Traffic" --examined the soul, jazz and blues elements separately and in depth.) And I would have added interviews of blues , classical and blues musicians. Most importantly of all, I would have mentioned that crucial period in his childhood when his grandmother inculcated inhim an appreciation of his Cherokee ancestry. After that, he could never think the blues--or any other kind of music--in a narrowly ethnic fashion. In fact in my more cynical moments, I suspect that the reason it took so unforgivably long to make an American Masters Documentary about Hendrix is that somebody was waiting for Noel Redding, Buddy Miles, Mitch Mitchell et al to all die first , so they could make a more sanitized version!

Overall, the film was satisfactory, but still a great missed opportunity to live up to its promise: to show in greater depth than hitherto seen an appreciation of why Jimi Hendrix meant so much to the American music tradition