Hendrix given a jazz treatment, first a small, intimate trio for a very large song...
...then a large jazz band version of a smaller, intimate song...
I wonder if the Army band's arrangement of their number is one of the arrangements done by Gil Evans; Evans was a master jazz arranger, producer, and conductor who worked extensively with Miles Davis; Davis was actively seeking a collaboration with Hendrix, but the project(s) were cut short by Hendrix's death; Davis, a notorious anti-social person with a very, very small circle of friends/associates, was bowled over by Hendrix's talents, particularly when he realized Hendrix couldn't even read music; Davis had thought, originally, that Hendrix had meticulously worked out and charted his arrangements of his recordings and was impressed by Hendrix's compositional skills; Davis even made a very rare public appearance to attend Hendrix's funeral/burial and was observed to be weeping at the service; Gil Evans did take the canceled Davis/Hendrix project further on by writing full arrangement for a number of Hendrix compositions and recorded the results and performed the arrangements with various incarnations of the Gil Evans Orchestra...
For those in the UK, the song Third Stone From the Sun may seem oddly familiar; Hendrix's girlfriend, when he first arrived in the UK, was Kathy Etchingham, and she recently noted in a new Hendrix biography that Jimi was a huge fan of the long-running UK soap opera Coronation Street; it seems he really like the open riff to the program's theme music and adapted it to his own Third Stone From the Sun song as the opening riff/run of the song and as the basis for the pulsating bass line that runs through the recording...
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