The Experience Hendrix tour always offers a healthy dose of electric guitar legends, but videos emerging from the 2025 leg show that young talent is just as capable of doing justice to Hendrix’s legacy.
Guests on recent shows include Ally Venable (25), Marcus King (29), and Mathias Lattin (22). Newcomers from recent years, such as Samantha Fish, Joanne Shaw Taylor, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, now return as established stars.
Fellow 20-somethings Zach Person and Artur Menezes are scheduled for forthcoming shows, with young guitar heroes in plentiful supply. The lineup is completed by legends like Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, and Eric Johnson.
With a fiesta red S-type, Ally Venable has been captured cranking out an appropriately combustible version of Fire.
Venable also joined Devon Allman and Mato Nanji of South Dakota rockers Indigenous for a stunning jam of Red House. This video is particularly entertaining for the audience member who shouts “Wow!” at 3:16 as Venable delivers a rapid-fire repeating lick.
2023 International Blues Challenge winner Mathias Lattin, meanwhile, delivered a raunchy Purple Haze, with his PRS responding a slight bit better to his grinding whammy bar abuse than Hendrix’s Strat used to.
On opening night, Lattin’s jazzy inflections and Hendrix-worthy wide bends sit beautifully alongside Kingfish’s more straightforward approach.
Though Marcus King rocked a Stratocaster with Devon Allman for Manic Depression, he doesn’t constrain himself to Jimi’s gear choices. For Crosstown Traffic, he plays an SG-style guitar into a Marshall JCM.
After the raw energy of the newcomers, the headliners offer a certain polish that comes from decades of experience. Kenny Wayne Shepherd, long touted as a successor to both Hendrix and SRV, appears to have embraced both mantles as he lays into Voodoo Child:
The current Experience Hendrix tour runs until April 12. Head over to the Experience Hendrix website for more info.
The 2024 Experience Hendrix tour's major star was actually a guitar: Hendrix's own 'Izabella' Woodstock Strat.
