Seattle's own legend: Jimi Hendrix

With today being his birthday, it seems appropriate that we feature Daryl Smith's Statute of  Seattle's Rock Legend JIMI HENDRIX.






Jo Ann took me to visit this Bronze Statue at the corner of Broadway and East Pine Street the day we went looking for more Painted Traffic Control Boxes on Capital Hill.

Photos by:  Cherri

The Seattle artist cast the statue in 1997 to be part of "The Legends Collection," a series of sculptures of musicians commissioned by Michael Malone, former chairman and CEO of AEI Music.   

A lot of research went into the making of the Jimi Hendrix statue. Hendrix's pose was one pictured in a famous photograph from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—the performance where Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire.


 



Smith spent a lot of time on the statue's smaller details as well, such as the arrangement of Hendrix's guitar strings. Hendrix was left-handed, but played a right-handed guitar stringed backwards for left-handed playing. To accurately portray this musical quirk, Smith re-stringed the right-handed guitar used in the mold, so that the sizes of the strings would match up.




Widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix pioneered the explosive possibilities of the electric guitar. Hendrix's innovative style of combining fuzz, feedback and controlled distortion created a new musical form. Because he was unable to read or write music, it is nothing short of remarkable that Jimi Hendrix's meteoric rise in the music took place in just four short years. His musical language continues to influence a host of modern musicians, from George Clinton to Miles Davis, and Steve Vai to Jonny Lang.

Jimi Hendrix, born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942, at Seattle's King County Hospital, was later renamed James Marshall by his father, James "Al" Hendrix.  Entirely self-taught, Jimi's inability to read music made him concentrate even harder on the music he heard.


Influenced musically by American rock and roll and electric blues, following initial success in Europe with his band the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he achieved fame in the US after his 1967 performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival. Later, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969, and the Isle of Wright Festival in 1970, before dying from drug-related asphyxia at the age of 27.

Jimi at Woodstock

Instrumental in developing the previously undesirable technique of guitar amplifier feedback, Hendrix favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume, gain and treble. He helped to popularize the use of the wah-wah pedal in mainstream rock, which he often used to deliver tonal exaggerations in his solos. He also pioneered experimentation with stereophonic phasing effects in rock music recordings.

Wikipedia has an excellent biography of this amazing artist Seattle claims as its own at the following link:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix