At His Best


Part of this material first appeared in 04/70 on the bootleg LP `This Flyer'. Recorded at Jimi's rented house, on Tavor Hollow Road, near Shokan, N.Y. late September 1969, about a month after Woodstock. The house in Shokan was Jimi's getaway, a place where he could relax, create, and just jam with friends. These recordings show Jimi further exploring the boundaries of his music. and feature Jimi, Mike Ephron on keyboards, Juma Sultan on flute and percussion, and Jerry Velez, also on percussion.

This is a semi-new one for me. At His Best was originally a 3 LP/tape set; Volumes 1, 2, and 3, and released on the Joker label. I've had these tapes for about 5 or 6 years now, and I had listened to maybe one side of a tape in all that time. Had mentioned to someone I am trading some music with that I had these, and he said he wanted copies of them. So I transferred them from tape, onto 2 CDs, listening to them as I did. And you know what? Some of the jams are pretty good. The sound quality at points is really rough, no doubt due to the age of the material, and multiple generations some of this material has gone through. Plus, these tapes have obviously been made just by taping straight from LPs, not master tapes (telltale thump of the needle lowering on one of the tapes). But the LPs for the most part were scratch free or new, so the tapes were relatively noise free, except for a very high pitch sound throughout. But it's low enough in volume to ignore. The song titles on the cassettes are mostly false, so I used the information from the book Electric Gypsy for the listing below. The titles as shown on the cassettes are shown in italics.

Catalog #: Joker MC 3271/2/3