Drummer Buddy Miles, drummer for Jimi Hendrix during the guitarist’s turbulent but creatively fertile final years, died yesterday. A prodigious youth spent drumming alongside his father in the Bebops led to Miles scoring apprentice gigs with R&B and soul acts like the Delfonics; as a twentysomething, he unleashed the decidedly heavier rhythms of Electric Flag with guitarist Mike Bloomfield before the band’s dissolution led to the self-explanatory Buddy Miles Experience. Miles’ Experience eventually recorded an album with the leader of another Experience behind the boards, and after Miles repaid the favor by contributing to Hendrix’s breakthrough Electric Ladyland, the guitarist tapped the drummer full-time in 1969 for his new rhythm section alongside bassist Billy Cox.

Rock critics continue to debate the power of the brief Band Of Gypsys period vis a vis the albums Hendrix recorded with the Experience, but of course the official recorded evidence fueling the debate is scant almost 40 years after the band stopped gigging, just a classic live album and a string of post-BOG records like Cry Of Love forever left in various stages of completeness by Hendrix’s death in the fall of 1970. The next two decades found Miles running through a string of solo and live albums in collaboration with post-Hendrix players like Carlos Santana, before he scored a slightly ignoble and completely unexpected pop cultural breakthrough in 1986 thanks to his voice being used for a certain group of clay raisins with a love of old Motown tunes. More recent years found Miles hitting the studio as a sideman on all-star albums alongside rock legends like Cream’s Jack Bruce and hooking up with his former bandmate Cox for a slightly redundant record of revamped Band Of Gypsys tunes. Miles was 60; Billboard reports that the cause of death has yet to be released to the press. [Billboard]