i love songs like message to love and machine gun but even if noel wasnt anything special as a bassist, he did the job, he did it well enough. i never listened to the first 3 experience albums where he was on bass and thought he was letting the side down. if he wasnt jaco pastorius lol then maybe thats a good thing - he provided something basic that let hendrix go off in other directions. which is kinda the role of the bassist in rock. its like the ringo starr argument - yeah he wasnt ginger baker, but what he did was just right for the beatles.

this is a can of worms but my personal take is that hendrix was not really cut out for the funk era, and when he tried to respond to some of the newer developments happening in black music at the time, it didnt really work that succesfully for him. i think his music is def funky at times, and it def grooves, but its in a rock n roll/blues way, rather than a funk/soul way. which is prob why those songs cut before his death werent quite as good as what he did before.