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Every once in a long while a musician arrives on the planet who changes the way we experience music.

I was recently in Seattle attending the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Music and had the opportunity to visit the aptly named Experience Music Project, which includes at present an exhibition of one of the city's native sons: "Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution in Sound."

Spending a couple of hours in this exhibition reminded me again that I have never heard or seen (film only for me, unfortunately) a more fluent musician than Jimi Hendrix. It's not just that he was visionary and an innovator in his use of the electric guitar, which is the focus of this exhibition, but that he was able to use the technology so magnificently in the service of musical expression. Sure, he was high; but the music was higher, and sometimes reaches a place where you still believe that Hendrix himself might just leave the ground. It was impossible to imagine this visceral, sexual energy waning gradually into old age and frailty, and, alas, this brightest of luminaries was burned up at age 27.

Like all great musicians, Hendrix had several musical frames of reference, but the one that is central, in my opinion, is the vocal singing style of the blues. In his best songs, he creates a universe around a simple and repetitive vocal line doubled on his guitar, punctuating this refrain with the thunderous power and wailing of his overdriven Stratocaster.

Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta and listening to Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver, James Brown and Junior Walker in high school, I was completely spellbound when I first heard the Jimi Hendrix Experience ("Are You Experienced") in 1967. But it was with "Electric Ladyland," the third album, that the essence of why so many of us found this man's musicmaking so potent was fully displayed. The recording of "Voodoo Child (Sight Return)" on this LP was an anthem, and if you watch the Woodstock video of his performance of this song (which is regularly posted at YouTube and withdrawn because of performance rights), you will see a sorcerer at work.