There’s a certain kind of internal freedom Hendrix had that enabled him to take a basic blues ...and do something totally original with it. That freedom is related to the kind of irony he approached his material with. Jimi had a pretty good sense of humor - he was a very skilled put-on artist. There are not many musicians you can compare him to. In jazz, the closest comparison would be Eric Dolphy, who had that tremendous sense of freedom. He said, ‘I don’t care what other guys used to play in this context - I feel like playing this!’ And like Dolphy, Hendrix had the technique to pull it off.