“Miles was an actual percussionist. Noel Redding was not.”
I think you mean Mitch Mitchell. Noel was the bass player.
He and Buddy Miles may have had very different styles, but Mitch was no slouch. He was a jazz drummer before joining the Experience, and had more formal music training than Jimi and Noel put together. In their early days, Mitch just about rewrote the book on rock drumming.
Mitch was a faaaaaarrrrr better drummer than Buddy Miles ever thought of being. Jimi himself grew tired of Buddy’s yodeling, one of the biggest daggers into the BOG, Jimi just didn’t care for Buddy on drums but was doing it for the black community power thing....
and on the Bill Graham story story at NYE. Jimi played two shows that night, the first one was all out Jimi with all the stops. At the end of the show Graham says yeah you did everything but actually play the guitar, how about trying that. So in the second (midnight) show is when he stood motionless and just wailed. The live recording of Machine Gun was from the 2nd performance.
Still the best ever. Sure there are guys out there now who can play faster or “better” or whatever but Jimi was the full package and had masterful control over all his elements.
Sometimes when I have time to kill and nothing to do I think alternate reality situations and my big dream would be go to back and save Hendrix from his death in London but then whisk him away to a secret hidden studio bunker equipped with modern technology. Give Jimi a locking tremolo, a modern effects rack, Pro Tools, etc, and lock him up for a few years to just clean life up and produce music that would be light years away.
We can dream cant we....
Well you are right, but I guess I was too, lol