Jimi Hendrix

By BRITT ROBSON
Special to the Star Tribune

For guitar lovers, the Experience Hendrix concert Wednesday at the Orpheum Theatre was a rhapsodic orgy of solos. Two-dozen songs were jammed into three full hours of music, with no intermission and no time spent on equipment changeovers, even as a seemingly endless cascade of luminaries came and went, mutating into various ensembles onstage.

For lovers of the late Jimi Hendrix —who will forever belong in the discussion over who was the greatest electric guitarist of all time— this full-fledged tribute was delightfully earnest in execution and fairly comprehensive in scope. It wasn't perfect, of course. Hendrix's sly songcraft, which he maximized via the often-bemused phrasing and soulful tone of his underrated vocals, was sacrificed on the altar of guitar heroism. If anything, there were too many moments of resplendence, creating what occasionally felt like a concert of encores, adding up to less than the sum of its frequently wonderful, dazzling parts.

That said, it would be difficult to whittle this extravaganza down to as few as a half-dozen highlights. There was Ernie Isley — the original Hendrix disciple, who lived with and watched Jimi play with his older siblings in the Isley Brothers — melding "Manic Depression" and "Amazing Grace" with the molten psychedelia Hendrix first minted. There was guitarist Vernon Reid blazing through some rapid-fire modulations on "Power of Love" and "Crosstown Traffic" while his bandmates from Living Colour cavorted in the audience.

Eric Johnson and Susan Tedeschi provided the night's lone prolonged glimpse of the sensitive Hendrix via the midtempo ballad "One Rainy Wish," before Johnson brilliantly captured the boastful, beguilingly droogy flavor of "Are You Experienced" with the help of three drummers. Kenny Wayne Shepherd footnoted nearly every riff in the guitar-hero handbook on "Voodoo Chile" yet had chops and panache enough to pull it off. And Joe Satriani plumbed the nether reaches of sonic outer space on "Third Stone From The Sun," then combined with Living Colour for a blistering "All Along The Watchtower" that was the night's most faithful approximation of Hendrix (on a Bob Dylan tune, no less).

David Hidalgo from Los Lobos had the unfortunate task of following Shepherd's pyrotechnics on "Can You See Me," before teaming with Howlin' Wolf's former guitarist Hubert Sumlin for a pre-Hendrix moment on "Killing Floor."Robert Randolph and Sacred Steel proved not to be the best vehicle for "Purple Haze"—the staccato edges in the rhythm shouldn't go missing like that—but recovered nicely when Living Colour's Corey Glover's falsetto and sacred steel soprano notes faced off at the end of "Them Changes."

At the end, nearly all of the evening's musicians took a bow, including bassist Billy Cox, the last living member from any of Hendrix's groups. His vocal on the bluesy "Red House" closed the show, and only gluttons could have felt that it wasn't enough.