OUTTAKES:BOLD AS LOVE

The idea was simple: piece together the album Jimi Hendrix was painstakingly recording when he overdosed in 1970. The reality was another matter. By the time of his death, Hendrix had been futzing about with various lineups and musical styles, leaving behind no song list for the record, which he had often referred to as First Ray of the New Rising Sun. So, Alan Douglas-who has both honored and desecrated the guitarist's catalog in his role as ''creative director'' of Hendrix's music-did the next best thing. He pruned through those tapes and compiled Voodoo Soup (MCA), a collection of '68-'70 recordings that give a sense of what Hendrix's never- completed fourth studio album could have sounded like. Another Hendrix hodgepodge? Yes, in a sense, since most of these songs have appeared on a string of shoddy posthumous albums. The catch is that this one actually hangs together; it's as fluid and cohesive as a preconceived record, without a bad song in the bunch. During the last year of his life, Hendrix mumbled to various reporters about creating what he called ''electric sky church music,'' airier, looser, and more spiritual than his earlier guitar-shard fireballs. Voodoo Soup captures the emergence of that side of his music, in songs like ''Angel'' (his most touching love song), the languid groove of ''Drifting,'' or the whimsical back- porch shuffle of ''Belly Button Window.'' There's still plenty of power and loop-de-loop guitar flash on movers and shakers like ''Freedom'' and ''Ezy Rider.'' But Hendrix was clearly searching for something deeper; ''the whole world is here for me to see,'' he sings, hopefully, in ''Room Full of Mirrors.'' The results are revelatory, and, curiously, not nearly as dated-sounding as 1968's overcooked Electric Ladyland, the studio album that preceded these recordings. One caveat: Two songs feature new drum parts (by a former member of the Knack, no less) recorded earlier this year. Yet they're nowhere near as disruptive as earlier, Douglas-supervised maulings of unfinished Hendrix tapes. Hendrix might never have found the artistic freedom he was looking for, but even in his latter-period confusion, he stumbled upon something just as important: music that was timeless and universal. A -DB

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