Crosstown Traffic

Charles Shaar Murray once asked B.B. King if he considered Jimi Hendrix to be a bluesman. 'I consider him to be a musician, a great, great musician.'

And Charles Shaar Murray has written the book that does justice to that accolade. It is more than a biography. The salient facts of Hendrix's life are summarized but the book's purpose is altogether of a higher order. Through a succession of wide-ranging, richly informed chapters the author describes Hendrix's very individual journey 'to the other side of town.' As Charles Shaar Murray says, Hendrix 'transgressed many boundaries; both arbitrary musical definitions separating blues and soul or jazz and rock, and also those fundamental divides between the archaic and the avant-garde, between individualist and collectivist philosophies, between blacks and whites, between America and Britain, between passive acquiescence and furious resistance, between lust for life and obsession with death.' 'Hendrix was Hendrix' it has been said. Charles Shaar Murray demonstrates the truth of this, compellingly elucidating the 'unique musical formulation' that was Hendrix's art.