Prepare for a deluge of Jimi Hendrix merchandise as the music industry marks the 40th anniversary of his death

• Hendrix started on the 'chitlin circuit' before an incendiary few years with the Experience. Picture: Complimentary

He will be a hard figure to avoid, as Super Bowl viewers who heard his song Fire on a commercial promoting Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains have already learned.

This is standard operating procedure these days. As the music business continues to reel from declining CD sales, figures such as guitarist Hendrix – who enjoys an Olympian stature rivalled only by the likes of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones – continue to be dominant forces in the marketplace.

Older fans remain loyal consumers, and for younger audiences they are essential rites of passage: in a typical year, the Hendrix catalogue is estimated to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

This week saw the release of Valleys of Neptune, the first album of previously unreleased studio recordings by Hendrix in more than a decade and the inaugural product of a deal announced last year between Experience Hendrix, the company that oversees his musical estate, and Legacy Recordings, the catalogue division of Sony Music Entertainment.

Lawsuits swirled around aspects of Hendrix's work during his lifetime, and – partly because he did not leave a will – that problem only intensified after his death. Over the years, albums have been issued, contested and withdrawn as claims and counterclaims, Dickensian in their complexity, flew.

Many of those issues have now been resolved, and the deal with Legacy, combined with a significant anniversary, has whetted the ambitions of Experience Hendrix.

Valleys of Neptune is being marketed as a contemporary album, with the title track actively promoted across radio and other media platforms. The Hendrix Rock Band game is just one of the efforts being employed to introduce him to younger audiences, though, unlike some of his classic-rock peers, Hendrix is not a figure who requires rehabilitation.

In 2003, he topped Rolling Stone's list of all-time great guitarists and the "freak flag" iconography surrounding him – his wild hair, wilder clothing and daring performance antics – have made him an enduring symbol of personal freedom.

But far beyond his continuing commercial significance, Hendrix is a particularly potent figure for our time, perhaps even more intriguing in symbolic terms now than at the time of his death.

Only 27 at the time of his death by misadventure after drinking heavily and consuming a girlfriend's sleeping pills, Hendrix at first seemed just another casualty of a tumultuous period littered with the corpses of consequential figures, both artistic and political.

Janis Joplin would die less than a month after Hendrix; Jim Morrison within a year. Protesters had been killed at campus demonstrations at Kent State and Jackson State universities in America only a few months earlier.

Amid the rancour of that era, Hendrix, like President Barack Obama, was viewed as a figure who transcended race – an achievement for which he was both admired and reviled.

Despite a personal and aesthetic style that revelled in his blackness, Hendrix never spoke out on the pressing civil rights issues of the day, either in his lyrics or in interviews and his audience was overwhelmingly white.

He came of age backing up the likes of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers on the so-called "chitlin circuit", but some African-Americans saw him as pandering to white stereotypes of black superstuds and resented his reverence for white artists such as Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Eric Clapton.

Some white critics and fans, meanwhile, sneered at his showmanship, inherited from likes of Chuck Berry and T-Bone Walker, as silly and unhip. What seemed subversive and provocative coming from someone like Mick Jagger was seen as unacceptable, even embarrassing, coming from a black man.

So much for transcendence. Robert Wyatt, whose former band Soft Machine toured the US with Hendrix in 1968, recalls the tension at concerts in the American South when visiting dignitaries would see young white women lingering backstage with Hendrix. "You don't have to go round making political statements on top of that," Wyatt says.

And Vernon Reid, the Living Colour guitarist who is participating in the Experience Hendrix tribute tour, says: "He was the Movement, his very existence, without his having to put his fist in the air. When you hear Machine Gun or The Star-Spangled Banner, there was much more said in those tunes than if he was a speechifying dude. In the world of great guitar solos, The Star-Spangled Banner just stands in this weird other place. He created, he was, the soundtrack of the nation at that time."

"That time" was 1969, the year principally documented by Valleys of Neptune. Uproarious in many ways, 1969 was a period of intense transition for Hendrix.

Electric Ladyland, the third and last studio album that would be released in his lifetime, had come out the previous year and made him one of the biggest rock stars in the world – the obvious choice, for example, to headline the Woodstock festival that August.

But Hendrix felt constrained by the limits of the Experience, the power trio he fronted that also featured bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. As he had on Electric Ladyland, he wanted to play with other musicians and explore different sounds and styles.

Like The Beatles, he had grown increasingly intrigued by the possibilities studio technology afforded and bored by performing on stage for fans who wanted to hear only his hits.

"Recording was really important to him," says John McDermott, the director of catalogue development at Experience Hendrix, who helped to assemble Valleys of Neptune. "He didn't own a Graceland. When he made real money, he went out and bought a recording studio."

Electric Ladyland, the studio Hendrix built for himself, would not be completed until 1970, so Valleys of Neptune consists, with a couple of exceptions, of recordings he did at the Record Plant in New York and at Olympic Studios in London in 1969.

A number of the tracks showcase the original Experience, but three feature bassist Billy Cox, an army buddy whom Hendrix called to New York when his relationship with Redding reached a breaking point.

Two of the tracks (Crying Blue Rain, essentially an instrumental with a wordless vocal by Hendrix, and Mr Bad Luck, which the Experience originally recorded in 1967) include parts added by Mitchell and Redding in 1987, long after Hendrix's death. The title track is also the product of some studio rejigging.

"For Valleys of Neptune, Jimi recorded a guitar-and-vocal track in '69, and then played it with the band in 1970, a year later, and we were able to line the two up, and they're perfect," says Eddie Kramer, who worked as an engineer with Hendrix and who co-produced Valleys of Neptune. "Now we have a final performance, which is something he probably intended to do."

Of course, what Hendrix "intended to do" is unknowable, even to an expert like McDermott or a collaborator and friend such as Kramer. As with authors whose posthumous work is assembled by scholars from partial manuscripts, questions about the appropriateness of finishing tracks that Hendrix left uncompleted persist, as they have since his death. Unlike many artists of his era, Hendrix owned the bulk of his studio recordings.

As McDermott acknowledges: "He could have used all of them, some of them, none of them. They were his."

Could the three studio albums that Hendrix released during his lifetime – Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, themselves reissued along with bonus DVDs this week – ever have been enough for fans eager to hear more of Hendrix and companies eager to meet that demand? No doubt Valleys of Neptune is among the most ambitious of his posthumous releases.

Put simply, it sounds like a Hendrix album – from the funky reworking of Stone Free with Cox on bass to a torrid electric version of Hear My Train A Comin' and a blistering instrumental rendition of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love. And McDermott takes pains to keep his claims for the album in check.

"These are not his last recordings, and these are not his 'lost' recordings," he says. "We've been very careful about that. But it's important to recognise that these are also not sketchy, one-guitar demos. This is real stuff that he obviously felt very strongly about."

Janie Hendrix, the guitarist's adopted half-sister, who is president and chief executive of Experience Hendrix, says the company has "about ten more years of music" in its vaults. A multi-disc set along the lines of The Beatles' Anthology project is in the works. Concert recordings and film from the Miami Pop Festival in 1968 and the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1969 are also being prepared for eventual DVD release.

For Adam Block, senior vice-president at Legacy, the fragmentation of the music marketplace presents only more opportunities for a figure of Hendrix's broad appeal. "We want to make each fan an appropriate offering," he says. "Is the complete Jimi Hendrix on vinyl something every music fan would want? Absolutely not. Would there be a market for it? Absolutely."

It's somewhat strange, needless to say, that all this activity whirls around the work of a man whose career as a recording artist lasted just four years. Described by Kramer as a "restless soul", Hendrix was constantly searching for a still centre in the storm that became his life in its final years.

"Who dies at 27?" responded Cox when asked if he had been afraid for Hendrix's wellbeing near the end. The sad answer to that question, however, is: someone like Jimi Hendrix, whose genius, artistic miscegenation, willingness to shatter boundaries and personal confusion ultimately left him a vulnerable, isolated figure amid innumerable sycophants and fans.

"His music acknowledges an existential loneliness," Reid says of Hendrix. "He abstracted the blues. You can draw a line from Death Letter (by the bluesman Son House] to The Wind Cries Mary. He's telling a tale, but he doesn't resolve it. It's not like there's a happy ending to any of these stories."