Jimi Hendrix had just a little more than two months to live when he performed at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival on July 4, 1970. No one in the audience—estimated at between 200,000 and double that—could have known that, of course, so there wasn’t a sense of finality or urgency surrounding the date. Although he was arguably the most popular performer to take the stage that weekend—playing to what would become his largest-ever U.S audience—Hendrix’s festival appearance, coming some three years after his breakthrough at Monterey, was hardly a rare occurrence. With hindsight, though, every Hendrix gig can be seen as important, and this official two-CD release of the Atlanta set (a companion to a new documentary, Electric Church), bestows greater significance on it than the event garnered at the time. Though it was billed as a Jimi Hendrix Experience release, that isn’t technically so—while drummer Mitch Mitchell is retained from the earlier group, bassist Noel Redding is gone, replaced by Billy Cox, the old friend who’d been playing with Hendrix in Band of Gypsys and other configurations. It’s a potent trio, for sure, and the set, heavy on material from Hendrix’s debut Are You Experienced? album and assorted studio tunes, kicks some serious ass here, with other tracks like “Hear My Train a Comin’,” “Red House” and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” allowing the trio to stretch and strut. It’s no more or less essential than any other posthumous live Hendrix, but the music is undeniably as scorching as the Georgia heat on that long-ago Independence Day.