— AYLA TESLER-MABÉ
THE STAGE WAS DARK when Melanie Faye began her solo performance at the closing session of Summit LA18, an invitation-only gathering of ideas and innovators held in downtown Los Angeles in November 2018. The lights slowly rose as she picked jazzy notes from a surf-green D’Angelico semi-hollow guitar, and by the time she segued into a rendition of “Little Wing,” they had revealed a stage nearly empty except for Faye.
A fresh face in the guitar pantheon, Faye had only become “internet famous” the previous year when a simple smartphone video shot as she sat on a floor playing a Stratocaster went viral. But her dexterous fretboard skills, and the influence of Jimi Hendrix upon them, were undeniable. She didn’t shy away from acknowledging her hero, either — a poster of him hung on the wall behind her, as if to announce her arrival to his lineage.
Five years later, the now 25-year-old Nashville guitarist’s intoxicating, inventive mashup of the Jimi Hendrix classic with an instrumental variation on pop singer Mariah Carey’s Number 1 hit “My All” has garnered millions of views on YouTube and inspired a transcription video that has clocked tens of thousands of its own.
That Faye’s reading of “Little Wing” was based on a version played by Eric Gales — who was hailed as the second coming of Hendrix when he first entered the national scene in the Nineties — reveals the connection generations of artists, and guitarists in particular, have to the music Hendrix created. There can never be another Hendrix, but the cosmic dust he left behind still informs and inspires the galaxy of music being created today.
“If you’re gonna do Hendrix at this point, like 50-something years later, you’d better put some type of unique interpretation on it, an unexpected twist, because we’ve heard it a million times,” Faye says. “It’s not enough to just hold a candle to his cover. You also have to put your own spin on it.”
JAMES in Seattle, Washington, on November 27, 1942, and died at age 27 in a London flat, half a world away, on September 18, 1970. Of the intervening years, his most prolific were his most visible, riding a wave of fame as the prince
