Jimi Hendrix deep within the blues and alive onstage at Woodstock - 25 years after death.

Since my bio on Jimi Hendrix was published 15 years ago, I would suppose by now that there is no danger in my becoming a "rock critic," a designation I could never figure out, especially for an African-American writer. My bio, originally titled Jimi Hendrix . . . Voodoo Child . . . in hardcover and revised, abridged, and retitled by me to 'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky in the early '80s for the Bantam Books mass-market paperback edition, is still very much in print and very much available having sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. It was - at least, I like to believe - the first book to proclaim Hendrix the total genius that he is and to say why, and, most importantly, to show how he was coming from an African-American perspective.

I wrote the book as the result of a promise I made to Hendrix at a nightclub in Manhattan in 1969. I had seen him go head to head with Sly Stone, who was then at his height, at the Fillmore East. They both blew me away so bad that I immediately revised my thinking about black music. While Amiri Baraka had gone from Blues People to Black Music, dealing with blues and jazz as art forms, I felt he had not really dealt with all that black expression in between. Not too many black writers were writing about the popular black music at that time.

While Sly Stone's music was eminently danceable, Hendrix's was not, although he himself had no trouble dancing to it. And also singing and playing and doing feats with his guitar - all at the same time. Hendrix was then playing a highly refined art music under the aegis of rock. If you listened beyond the standard drums and bass routines, there emerged an amazing virtuoso artist on guitar. Many heard it then, many hear it now. People have not stopped listening to Hendrix, because his shit is the real deal.

Recent events have shown that Hendrix's spirit is still very much involved in this world. The day in April of 1993 when a touring art show that featured representations of Hendrix's image, entitled "The Jimi Hendrix Exhibition," opened at a gallery in New York City's Soho district, Al Hendrix, his father, launched a lawsuit against the organizers of the show, who control the Hendrix Estate and who are also therefore the "legal" owners of Jimi Hendrix - all he had produced, including his image. Those anonymous entities purchased Jimi Hendrix some years ago. If this is not posthumous slavery, pop zombie-ism, then I don't know what is. The word out at this show was that they were not interested in anything about the strange circumstances of Hendrix's death. They were celebrating his life.

While those anonymous owners of Hendrix's oeuvre were avoiding talk or images of his death, a former girl friend, Kathy Etchingham, sought to have the original racist inquest reopened in England, where Hendrix was pronounced dead under mysterious circumstances in September of 1970. The inquest allowed an "open verdict" that meant they could not really say how he died, but many people who testified told conflicting stories before and after their testimonies. And the ambulance drivers, who apparently were not listened to at the time, recently stated that, when the ambulance got to the Samarkand Hotel, the flat was empty except for Hendrix's dead body, a wine-soaked towel around his neck. Of course, the inquest was not allowed to be re-opened, but Etchingham may continue to defy those who would not enjoy such access to the rewards of Hendrix's genius if it were discovered that he was actually murdered. A girlfriend who was near him at the end stated soon afterwards on a radio program that the Mafia had killed him.

Hendrix once said that rock 'n' roll was simply blues. Perhaps if he had waxed more extendedly on that subject black musicians might have heard it. It took the Black Rock Coalition behind Vernon Reid's band, Living Colors, to pound that point home way later.

But no matter how you designate the music, what matters in the end is how well it is played, be it for the dancers on a postage-sized dance floor or for a venue the size of Woodstock, a rolling expanse of earth as far as the eye can see. To listen to Hendrix today is constantly to be reminded of his gifts. His precise and rapid picking, his recognizance of sound and noise (from the most common blues rhythm guitar run, to the walls of distortion he created, to his ability to range between pure blues and avant-garde jazz forms), and more importantly his improvisational ability - all point out the totality of his delivery. While nearly all guitarists today have gone through his licks, they cannot get near to what he was unless they actually play his compositions (and that's what they are - compositions), and there you see how impossible it is for one guitarist to get the sound he got. I always wondered how it would be if an entire symphony were to play his compositions the way he played them. Not the way, it turned out, Gil Evans arranged them at Carnegie Hall either. It was a good effort, but it just pointed out how difficult the work really is. Hendrix made it sound easy. But if one feat of his remains paramount it would be his ability to play with feedback, control it, and make it melodic. I had heard Peter Townsend of the Who say that he had pioneered the use of feedback. I spent a few hours going through all of the Who's shit without ever hearing anything that approached Hendrix's control or melodic use of feedback within a song.

Just about all of the music released on two recent CDs - Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock (MCAD 11063) and Jimi Hendrix: Blues (MACD 11060) - ave been available for some time to collectors or aficionados via bootlegs, often from those friends of various music industry personnel who have had access to board tapes of concerts or dubs or out-takes from recording sessions, or copies of jams and audience-taped performances recorded on a wide array of sound machinery.

But to those music fans unaware of Hendrix's broad range, the blues CD must be amazing. It places him well within the pantheon of blues greats. The CD cover has, collaged against Hendrix's profile, small portraits of B. B. King, Chuck Berry, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, Ike Turner, Lightning Hopkins, Robert Jr Lockwood, Guitar Slim, Son House, Elmore James, Otis Rush, and others. For those who knew Hendrix's music well, this "status" was never an issue. I had always thought Hendrix should have an all-blues album out, although I would perhaps have selected a few different cuts - perhaps some Dylan tunes Hendrix did so bluesily the lyrics become nothing but a progression on the form, as Hendrix's playing was. Someday I'd like to hear an all-instrumental Hendrix CD. He was not all that sold on singing but knew what he had to do. You can hear him when he did not want to sing on the Isle of Wight performance and on many legs of what turned out to be his last tour in the early fall of 1970.

Hendrix could impersonate Albert King's vocal style and play him lick for lick, as he could Muddy Waters and just about any other living bluesman of that time. But Hendrix and Albert King both being left-handed guitarists means something very subtle in the sound. In Jimi Hendrix Blues we hear "Hear My Train A Comin'" on an acoustic version of 12-string, an instrument we never heard enough of from the man; "Born Under A Bad Sign," Albert King's tune; "Red House," Hendrix's signature blues composition, where the love is the woman and the guitar, and if he can't have her, then he'll try his sister. And when all else fails, he still has his guitar - the ever-faithful lover. "Catfish Blues," from Rollin' and Tumblin', and "Rolling Stone" Hendrix introed as "Muddy Waters' Blues," since they are blues of the maestro, by and large, of whom Hendrix remarked: "The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death." "Voodoo Chile Blues" is Hendrix's signature fusion of the blues with the African and African-American religious-magical tradition. Blues and jazz here form a sort of post-modern voodoo; the title could be more precisely, "Hoodoo Chile." "Mannish Boy" is another Muddy Waters tune that includes some of its precursor, Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man," and some more contemporary rock repertoire flourishes. "Once I Had A Woman" is Hendrix in a "Red House" extension. "Bleeding Heart" is more Elmore James than anyone else, although the CD literature deems it "traditional," with a new arrangement by Hendrix. That "traditional" label has long been a device employed to get around crediting and paying blues lyricists and composers. "Jelly 292" is another take of "Jam, 292" on the 1974 Loose Ends LP. "Electric Church Red House" is Hendrix's, a studio jam, and "Hear My Train A Comin'," electric version, was recorded live at the Berkeley Community Theater in Berkeley, California, blocks from the housing project where Hendrix spent significant years of his early childhood. A full-blown riot was occurring in Berkeley over People's Park while this recording was being made.

Hendrix came on last at Woodstock, at nine o'clock in the morning, after everyone had been up all night and was into the process of leaving. Pissed off, yet professional, Hendrix brought to the stage the most extended and personalized band he had ever assembled: Mitch Mitchell on drum kit; Billy Cox, bass; Larry Lee, guitar; Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez, percussion. He finally had the bottom he wanted with the addition of congas and bongos, a second rhythm guitarist who could help approximate the complex layers he laid down by himself in the studio, and a bedrock of a bass player who could match his improvisational flamboyance with a wit and subtlety in repetition only known to truly bad bassists. They do "Fire," "Izabella," "Hear My Train A Comin' (Get My Heart Back Together)," "Red House," "Jam Back At The House (Beginnings)," "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) / Steppingstone," "The Star-Spangled Banner" (which Ornette Coleman said is a work of true genius), and "Purple Haze." And then, after an extended solo improvisation, "Villanova Junction." The last leg of Hendrix's Woodstock performance is a great example of Hendrix's jamming ability. Playing alone, going through the ideas in his head as they happen and delving deeply into the improvisational mode where blues and jazz truly intersect, is the place Hendrix listeners rarely have access to. That this intimacy is from one of the largest concerts in music history is an indication of how very close Hendrix felt to his audience. He wrote, at Woodstock:

500,000 halos . . . outshined the mud and history We washed and drank in God's tears of joy, And for once . . . and for everyone . . . the truth was not a mystery -

Love called to all . . . music is magic. As we passed over and beyond the walls of nay. Hand in hand as we lived and made real the dreams of peaceful men -

We came together . . . Danced with the pearls of Rainy weather Riding the waves of music and Space - Music is magic . . . magic is life . . . Love as never Loved Before . . . Harmony to Son and Daughter . . . man and wife.

David Henderson is a New York-based writer and poet and biographer of Jimi Hendrix.