In the documentary, on the Blu-Ray disc included in this set, the surviving participants telling the origin story of Electric Lady studios provide all the necessary and relevant details of the famed recording venue’s humble beginnings; producer Eddie Kramer, spotlighted most, even shows off a bit of contemporaneous mixing and grooving at the board. What’s missing, regrettably, from the doc is the perspective of the musician who conceived of, owned, and occupied the space most significantly, and with whom this now-historic Manhattan spot is essentially synonymous: Jimi Hendrix.

For that perspective, instead, this four-disc package has three CDs loaded with alternate takes, mixes, and demos from the visionary artist, as a compact but comprehensive sampling of Hendrix’s incessant and evolutionary process, conjuring up track after track of incendiary and affecting, guitar-driven wonders. Imagined initially as a nightclub where Jimi could jam whenever and with whomever he wanted, that idea was scrapped instead for a fully modern recording studio, manned by Kramer and a team of on-call engineers that turned up faithfully at the behest of Hendrix and his muse. Hendrix insisted that Electric Lady feature a relaxed, multi-colored vibe as it boasted the finest gear and acoustics available. With all this, and without the constraint of record label budgets and scheduling concerns, Jimi was free to be.

Electric Lady soon gained a rep as a hot-spot studio, and no less than Led Zeppelin and Carly Simon were soon making immortal records there, along with other aspirational artists that sometimes left Hendrix in the hallway waiting to use his own room. 

The results, nearly 40 examples of them in this collection, are now here to hear. And while the bulk of these songs in various stages of completion likely will appeal most to the Jimi devotees, even the casual Hendrix fan will find the works-in-progress to be revealing and elemental to understanding where he went and may have gone next, if not for his tragic passing in 1971. Scorchers such as “Freedom,” “Dolly Dagger,” and “Angel”- with multiples of each appearing across the three discs- give plenty of formidable evidence. It’s apparent that with a dedicated space and elastic amounts of time to carve away at the marble, Hendrix, with Kramer’s guiding ear, was able to find the eventual beauty in every stone.