Betty Davis is one of the lost greats of 70s funk, but if there is any justice in the world her music will one day be as revered as it deserves to be. This woman was outrageous, sexy and she had mad musical chops! Originally a successful fashion model when she met trumpeter Miles Davis, Betty Mabry, as she was then known, traveled in circles that included Jimi Hendrix, The Chamber Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone. In 1968 she married Davis, but the marriage lasted just one year, breaking up, it was rumored, because she was having an affair with Hendrix (which she has always denied). In his autobiography, Davis credits Betty for opening his ears to the new possibilities inherent in the music of Sly and Jimi, and she inspired his music from Filles De Kilimanjaro (Mademoiselle Mabry is a tribute to Betty, obviously) to Bitches Brew (the title again alleged to reference Mlle. Mabry, albeit by then in a less flattering light).

After her divorce from Miles, Betty recorded two albums in the early 70s with crack backing musicians like Larry Graham, Merl Saunders (Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt), Neal Schon (Santana/Journey) and members of Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, even the young Pointer Sisters singing back-up. Davis was the original “nasty gal” creating the blueprint for suggestive “outrageousness” well-trod by today’s female chart toppers. One of her songs, the sexually forthright If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up was so controversial that the NAACP condemned her.
 

 
Then she recorded another great record of hard funk in 1975 called Nasty Gal, but sadly, she never really caught on. There’s no good reason for it, but luckily her reputation has risen again in recent years due to reprints of her albums by Seattle-based label, A Light in the Attic Records, who recently released her recorded in 1976 but shelved ever since album, Is It Love or Desire.

(When I met my future wife, she had a Betty Davis CD in her car stereo. As a man who puts “good taste in music” approximately third on the list of what makes a woman attractive, I can assure you I was impressed).

The Sound of Young America: Betty Davis Interview ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú June 21, 2007: Betty Davis gives her first radio interview in 30 years.

 
In the past year, I’ve been starting to delve into the quirky jazz sub-genre of Afrofuturism. One of the first posts I made on this blog when we launched was about organist Larry Young’s insane 1973 jazzspacerock monolith Lawrence of Newark. I’ve also told you of my love for Parliament-Funkadelic. The whole idea of outer space “Black Power” style sci-fi theorizings—especially if there are costumes and polemic involved—is something I give a big thumbs up to. After searching out more of Young’s music (look out for the bootleg of him jamming with Jimi Hendrix and the Love, Cry, Want album, recorded live at the Washington Mall during a concert that Nixon had the plug pulled on) and listening to his work obsessively in the car for months, I began to make tentative (and not for the first time) inroads to the unbelievably vast—over 1000 songs—catalog of the great Sun Ra.

It’s not easy to find an entry point into Sun Ra’s sprawling oeuvre. Every Sun Ra fan has a strong opinion and no one agrees on where to start. I’ve digested Jazz in Silhouette, Space is the Place, Secrets of the Sun, The Singles, The Nubians of Plutonia and the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra—the ones you are “supposed” to start off with—but I find that the Transparency label’s Lost Reel Collection of rare Sun Ra recordings contain some of the most astonishing material I’ve heard thus far. I’m one of those people who likes the really “difficult” Miles Davis material (circa 1970 to 1975) so the futher out, usually, the better as far as I am concerned to jazz. According to a rock snob friend of mine who would know, the cache of tapes Transparency has access to are like no other material found in the official released Sun Ra canon. If you read the reviews, Sun Ra fanatics are going nuts over these discs, but always with the caveat that they’re for advanced Sun Ra listeners only. I’m not so sure that’s true because I’m really only now getting deeper into his music and these albums simply blew me away.

The first one I listened to was the fourth disc in the series, Dance of the Living Image. The tape it was mastered from was found in a box marked “Mexico City, 1/26/74” but instead it’s probably a rehearsal tape from San Francisco. The tape gets turned on and off abruptly, off when the things start to fall apart, then on again when inspiration flows and the musicians start to gel again. Hypnotic, syncopated, lumbering—almost dark—when the members of the group lock in, they seem to go through a psychic mind meld, especially during the final 17-minute long jam on disc one.

The Creator of the Universe, volume one in the series, I listened to next. The first CD (many of the Lost Reel Collections are two disc sets) is a live recording at a San Francisco warehouse with a long impassioned black power speech, with a blaring call and response from the horn section. It’s totally wild and eccentric. Sun Ra improvises brilliantly on a Moog synthesizer. Some of it sounds like PiL’s Metal Box or Krautrock. The second disc is a recording of a lecture given by Sun Ra at UC Berkeley in 1971. It’s out of the ballpark amazing. In one part of the speech, Sun Ra explains how the different races have different vibrations and different innate born talents and things they can each do better than the other races and why we should all respect one another, because of our differences as much as our commonality. It’s sweet, cosmic, funny, deep and everything you would hope a lecture by Sun Ra would be.

I could go on about this further, but why not sample a little Sun Ra yourself? Here’s an audio blog with links to a lot of Sun Ra material. And here are a couple of fantastic Sun Ra clips found on YouTube:
 

8-bit versions of Miles Davis standards. Neat!

(Link here.)

Fred Kaplan at Slate writes an appreciation of one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis:

Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthe best-selling jazz album of all time?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùand the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don’t like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It’s cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics regard it as one of the best jazz albums ever made? What is it about Kind of Blue that makes it not just pleasant but important?

Kind of Blue: Why the best-selling jazz album of all time is so great by Fred Kaplan

 
Miles Davis’ Sorcerer and Archie Shepp’s The Magic of Ju-Ju are just two of the nearly 700 jazz albums getting their deluxe due in Taschen’s newly released (and assuredly hefty) book, Jazz Covers.

This volume features a broad selection of jazz record covers, from the 1940s through the decline of LP production in the early 1990s.  Each cover is accompanied with a fact sheet listing performer and album name, art director, photographer, illustrator, year, label, and more.

But it’s not all psychedelic skulls and Cicely Tyson.  The folks at Taschen fleshed the project out with contributors ranging from John Coltrane authority, Ashley Kahn, to famed Blue Note producer, Michael Cuscuna.
 

 
Taschen Books: Jazz Covers

Prince of Darkness: Essential Audio Only Track Off Miles Davis’ Sorcerer

Ian Johnson designed this jaw-dropping series of skateboards for Western Edition. The skateboards depict the 1959 lineup of the Miles Davis Quintet, the group who played on the classic album “Kind of Blue.”

Update: Dangerous Minds reader Greg says, “Hi, just thought I’d let you know that this product and description are a bit wrong: The group that played with Miles Davis on the 1959 album ‘Kind of Blue’ was a sextet. You have missed out Cannonball Adderley. Also, on one of the tracks (Freddie Freeloader) Wynton Kelly played piano not Bill Evans. Just thought you’d like to know, Greg”

Ian Johnson

(via Nerdcore)