India, June 12 -- It is a night sometime in the mid-1960s, Greenwich Village, New York City. The air in the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street carries the residue of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, and the rebellious zeitgeist of that era. A young woman with a battered acoustic guitar finishes her set. Across the room, a slight figure with an Afro and a guitar that seems to grow from his shoulder watches with the intensity of a hawk. He approaches, pulls up a barstool, and plays along with her.

This is not yet Jimi Hendrix. He is still Jimmy James, playing small rooms with his band, the Blue Flames. But he has found something in this woman's music that compels him - that rare, undefinable quality that makes one musician recognise another no...