51st Anniversary


A massive set, 51st Anniversary was put out in 1993, the year Jimi would have been 51. An 8(!) CD set, made up of a combination of studio and live tracks. I'd review everything here, except this page would end up being about 100000 lines long. So we'll go with a more general review. A number of the tracks here have come out on other releases since this first came out, but scattered over many more discs. There are a few non-Jimi tracks, or suspected non-Jimi tracks, but not enough to feel like you've been ripped off. At least the fake God Save The Queen isn't on this set. There are some new (to me) tracks at least, which made the effort of copying this set worth it. And at points, it was quite an effort. Out of the 8 CDs, 5 were over the 74 minute limit for a CD-R. No problem, I thought foolishly. There are 2 that are short enough that with a little re-arranging, will be able to fit everything onto 8 CDs. Seemed simple right? Well, if it seems simple, it probably ain't. It turns out that on almost every song, the indexing was off. Indexing tells your CD player where the song breaks are on the CD. Some songs were a half-second off, meaning you might get a bit of the previous song or miss the first bit of the song you selected. In one case however, the first 10 minutes of a 20 minute jam was shifted to the end of the song before it! Makes it very difficult and time consuming to copy and edit, especially when you're talking 8 friggin' CDs!!! Oh well... This was a set I first heard about nearly 4 years ago, and one I thought I'd never have. But now I do :) As a bonus, this set comes with a video of the first set of the 1/9/69 concert (though I don't have this video yet, it is coming soon), however it is in the European PAL format. You will need to have it transferred over to NTSC if you live in North America and wish to view it. A hardcover a book comes with it as well. All in all, a very nice set for a Hendrix fanatic, though this may be a very hard one to find these days.

Quality of this set is very good to excellent. Only a few minor problems with this set, most noticably the track indexing, and the occasional non-Jimi track. But if you're a big Hendrix fan, don't have most of these on other CDs and most importantly, have the cash for this monster :), I definitely recommend it.

Catalog #: JMH-001/8