When athletic height jumping was considered done and perfected, there was the Fosbury flop which opened new possibilities. Do you think there was such a moment in the music history? When someone showed how things can be done and from there everyone is using his/her technique?
Hendrix. Hendrix is the fosbury of music. Dude went off in his own direction in both technical and compositional terms, and a lot of people followed.
There’s solid points in the comments, but I feel like we’re talking about a single individual ignoring convention here, and there’s really only one answer in that context :)
Listen, I love and respect the hell out of Jimi, but to claim he’s the only one who ever revolutionized music is fucking insane. There have been so many others that completely changed the game.
There were others who changed sports as well… Fosbury didn’t cause the Olympic committee to implement any bans, which is to say that others arguably attempted much larger changes…
He simply tried something way the hell off the beaten path and it caused people to think differently about how to go about doing their thing.
Jimi wasn’t even the only revolutionary influence in his time, you could argue chuck berry had more influence at the time, you could argue Charlie christian had more influence at sorta the same time, you could argue Zeppelin, Sabbath, the Beach boys…
Nobody came crashing into music from deep left field like Hendrix did though, just like nobody came into the Olympics from deep left field the way fosbury did (I’d argue for korbut, but nobody followed her lead due to pretty much everything she did getting banned).
I get what you mean and don’t disagree, but I did say I was speaking to a specific context ;)