The Mitch Mitchell Experience

The 1967 album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?, featured a virtuoso musician who changed the way we played rock music. His name was Mitch Mitchell. Yes, Jimi was pretty hot. But he never burned as brightly as he did when Mitch Mitchell was by his side, and in particular on that genuinely iconoclastic recording.

Whatever Hendrix could do on the guitar, Mitchell could match on the drums. And like Ginger Baker, Mitchell brought the skills, the attack and the bravado of jazz music to the rock arena.

Mitchell, the longest-surving member of the Experience, died at the end of a Hendrix tribute tour of America. And why mention him now? Because increasingly I feel his ghost present whenever we go out to play.