. . . on the piano or on the horn, and he would get it faster than a motherfucker. He had a natural ear for hearing music. Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist. There was a fairly general consensus, you know, among leading jazz musicians who had taken the opportunity to get into Jimi Hendrix, that had he taken a strict jazz direction with his music, which he was certainly capable of doing, that Jimi would certainly have been one of the jazz giants.

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