Death, post-mortem, and burial

Main article: Death of Jimi Hendrix

The Samarkand Hotel, where Hendrix spent his final hours

Although the details of Hendrix's last day and death are widely disputed, he spent much of September 17, 1970, in London with Monika Dannemann, the only witness to his final hours.^[272] Dannemann said that she prepared a meal for them at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel, 22 Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill, sometime around 11 p.m., when they shared a bottle of wine.^[273] She drove Hendrix to the residence of an acquaintance at approximately 1:45 a.m., where he remained for about an hour before she picked him up and drove them back to her flat at 3 a.m.^[274] Dannemann said they talked until around 7 a.m., when they went to sleep. She awoke around 11 a.m., and found Hendrix breathing, but unconscious and unresponsive. She called for an ambulance at 11:18 a.m., which arrived on the scene at 11:27 a.m.^[275] Paramedics then transported Hendrix to St Mary Abbot's Hospital where Dr. John Bannister pronounced him dead at 12:45 p.m. on September 18, 1970.^[276]
To determine the cause of death, coroner Gavin Thurston ordered a post-mortem examination on Hendrix's body, which was performed on September 21 by Professor Robert Donald Teare, a forensic pathologist.^[277] Thurston completed the inquest on September 28, and concluded that Hendrix aspirated his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates.^[278] Citing "insufficient evidence of the circumstances", he declared an open verdict.^[279] Dannemann later revealed that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed Vesparax sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.^[280]
After Hendrix's body had been embalmed by Desmond Henley,^[281] it was flown to Seattle, Washington, on September 29, 1970.^[282] After a service at Dunlop Baptist Church on October 1, it was interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, Washington, the location of his mother's gravesite.^[283] Hendrix's family and friends traveled in twenty-four limousines and more than two hundred people attended the funeral, including several notable musicians such as original Experience members Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, as well as Miles Davis, John Hammond, and Johnny Winter.^{[284][nb 35]}

Unauthorized and posthumous releases

By 1967, as Hendrix was gaining in popularity, many of his pre-Experience recordings were marketed to an unsuspecting public as Jimi Hendrix albums, sometimes with misleading later images of Hendrix.^[286] The recordings, which came under the control of producer Ed Chalpin of PPX, with whom Hendrix had signed a recording contract in 1965, were often re-mixed between their repeated reissues, and licensed to record companies such as Decca and Capitol.^[287] Hendrix publicly denounced the releases, describing them as "malicious" and "greatly inferior", stating: "At PPX, we spent on average about one hour recording a song. Today I spend at least twelve hours on each song."^[288] These unauthorized releases have long constituted a substantial part of his recording catalogue, amounting to hundreds of albums.^[289]
Some of Hendrix's unfinished material was released as the 1971 title The Cry of Love.^[232] Although the album reached number three in the U.S. and number two in the UK, producers Mitchell and Kramer later complained that they were unable to make use of all the available songs because some tracks were used for 1971's Rainbow Bridge; still others were issued on 1972's War Heroes.^[290] Material from The Cry of Love was re-released in 1997 as First Rays of the New Rising Sun, along with the other tracks that Mitchell and Kramer had wanted to include.^{[291][nb 36]}
In 1993, MCA Records delayed a multimillion-dollar sale of Hendrix's publishing copyrights because Al Hendrix was unhappy about the arrangement.^[293] He acknowledged that he had sold distribution rights to a foreign corporation in 1974, but stated that it did not include copyrights and argued that he had retained veto power of the sale of the catalogue.^[293] Under a settlement reached in July 1995, Al Hendrix prevailed in his legal battle and regained control of his son's song and image rights.^[294] He subsequently licensed the recordings to MCA through the family-run company Experience Hendrix LLC, formed in 1995.^[295] In August 2009, Experience Hendrix announced that it had entered a new licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment's Legacy Recordings division which would take effect in 2010.^[296] Legacy and Experience Hendrix launched the 2010 Jimi Hendrix Catalog Project, starting with the release of Valleys of Neptune in March of that year.^[297] In the months before his death, Hendrix recorded demos for a concept album tentatively titled Black Gold, which are now in the possession of Experience Hendrix LLC; as of 2013 no official release date has been announced.^{[298][nb 37]}