Blues-rock newcomer Amani Burnham’s love of full-step bends, trills and pentatonic fills leads to inevitable Jimi Hendrix comparisons, but his style isn’t outright mimicry – the 20-year-old happens to draw inspiration from the same well of artists as the guitar icon.
“Chuck Berry was my first guitar hero,” he says on a call from his Connecticut home, where he also grew up listening to the Beatles, Little Richard and Fats Domino records in his father’s collection. “But the stuff Hendrix was feeling in that moment was coming out of his guitar,” he says. “I was very intrigued by that and also the sort of lyrics that he came up with and the chord changes.”
