There’s no shortage of Jimi Hendrix in the air, these days.
Between The Experience Hendrix Tour and the just-released "West Coast Seattle Boy: The Jimi Hendrix Anthology," the Hendrix family is on a roll.
"This year has been very special because it marked the 40th anniversary of (Hendrix's) passing," Janie Hendrix, the rock icon's sister and Experience Hendrix president and CEO, told Billboard.com.
The company started with the March release of the rarities set, "Valleys of Neptune," and continues with "West Coast Seattle Boy," which features four discs of unreleased material and alternate takes, including a full disc of pre-Experience tracks recorded with Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, Don Covay and others.
The box also includes the documentary "Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child," narrated by Bootsy Collins. Deluxe editions of "Jimi Hendrix Experience: BBC Sessions," "Jimi Hendrix: Blues" and "Live at Woodstock," and the holiday EP, "Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year," came out the same day, as well.
In 2011, there’s a documentary due about Hendrix's 1969 concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall, his "homecoming" shows of a sort, since he launched the Experience in England.
"It's kind of a day in the life of Jimi, how we put it together," Hendrix says of the project, which has been two years in the making. "There were about four cameras that followed Jimi and the guys around in Europe and filmed the two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, as well as them coming off trains, planes and automobiles, signing autographs, Jimi backstage getting ready, in his apartment doing little apartment jams with his friends and then later playing the Speakeasy. It's not an actor playing Jimi; it's Jimi, and he really does forget the cameras are rolling and you see those sides of him, the stage and the sweetness with different girlfriends -- there's several that are in the film -- and how he was around friends and how he was really into listening to the (tape of) the night before's performance."
Hendrix says she hopes to release the Albert Hall documentary theatrically and possibly as a pay-per-view TV offering in addition to DVD. There will also be a companion soundtrack album of live performances from the show.
Meanwhile, what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 70th birthday in 2012 will be commemorated by a film of his performance at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, culled from recently unearthed "pristine" footage from the show.
Check out more Jimi news at Billboard here.
Jimi Hendrix – Spanish Castle Magic
Konserthuset - Stockholm, Sweden - January 9, 1969
