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Betty and Miles Davis ringside at the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier title fight in New York, 1971. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis
Betty and Miles Davis ringside at the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier title fight in New York, 1971. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

Miles Davis: The muse who changed him, and the heady Brew that rewrote jazz

This article is more than 13 years old
Forty years ago, Miles Davis rewrote the jazz rulebook with his album Bitches Brew – but he never would have made it without the inspiration of the amazing Betty Mabry, as she now reveals in a rare interview

As the incendiary year of 1968 dawned, Miles Dewey Davis found himself in a most unusual situation: he was no longer hip. The trumpeter had reigned as the crown prince of jazz for nearly two decades, his music mutating subtly through hard bop to the mesmeric lyricism of 1959's Kind of Blue. Where he led, others followed. To go with his music was Miles's persona as the acme of cool, aloof in immaculate mohair suits, an outsider unreachable behind an unsmiling glare, with the Zen riddle of "So What" for his signature tune.

Yet at 41 years of age, the crown prince of jazz had unaccountably slipped behind the beat of the times. He and his quintet still held court at New York's Village Gate and were still making albums of poise and invention such as Miles Smiles (1966) and Sorcerer (1967), but for a new generation weaned on Motown and Black Power, Davis and his music were suddenly passé. The young African-Americans being conscripted to fight for Uncle Sam in Vietnam went to war humming James Brown, not "So What".

Even arch jazzers in search of new frontiers were beholden to the "free" experimentalism of Ornette Coleman rather than to Miles. Still, as Miles would put it in his 1990 autobiography: "I wasn't prepared to be a memory yet." Over the next two years, he would pull off a breathtaking act of reinvention, disbanding his lauded quintet in favour of electrically charged line-ups using two drummers, two bass players and two, even three, keyboards. It was a process of exploration that culminated in 1970's Bitches Brew – an album that spawned a new genre, fusion – which has has now been lavishly reissued for its 40th anniversary. En route, the elegant suits were swapped for a garish wardrobe of suede, leather, jerkins and scarves, the respectful world of jazz clubs for noisy rock venues.

Miles's embrace of electricity split the jazz world between excitement and contempt but he remained unrepentant. "I had seen the way to the future and I was going for it like I had always done," he reflected later. "I had to change course to continue to love what I was playing."

The catalyst for Miles's change, the woman responsible for his glimpse of the future, was his new lover Betty Mabry, a 22-year-old model whom he had met late in 1967 and whom he would make his second wife a year later. Their marriage would last only a year, yet the influence of Betty Davis (she retained her married name) on Miles would be profound.

When they met, Mabry was a successful model, her stunning looks matched by a fiery spirit and a cutting-edge sensibility. She already hosted her own New York club, the Cellar, and planned to become a singer, an ambition she would realise a few years later on a trio of sassy albums. It was Betty who turned Miles's ears towards rock and funk, to James Brown and Sly Stone and especially to the cosmic forays of Jimi Hendrix, whom she knew and whose music, bafflingly, had evaded Miles's radar.

"His world was progressive jazz, plus he was a lover of classical music, so there were lots of things he hadn't picked up on," Betty told me in a very rare interview. Only recently, after the reissue of her long-deleted albums, has she re-emerged from the seclusion she entered at the close of the 1970s. She now lives in Pittsburgh, and sounded demure when we spoke, no longer the wild child.

Her influence on her ex-husband has never been forgotten, however. Speaking in 2003 about Miles's conversion to an electric groove, guitarist Carlos Santana recalled Betty as "indomitable – she couldn't be tamed. Musically, philosophically and physically, she was extreme and attractive".

The courtship was not without problems. At their first meeting, Miles patted a stool and asked Betty to "sit on my hand" – she demurred – and as he drove her home in his Lamborghini told her he "liked little girls". "I ain't no girl," she spat back.

Betty's impact on Miles is etched into Filles de Kilimanjaro, the album he released in the autumn of 1968, which featured his new wife on its sleeve and contained two tunes inspired by her, "Mademoiselle Mabry" and "Frelon Brun". Both are modelled on Hendrix riffs, respectively "The Wind Cries Mary" and "If 6 Was 9".

By then, Betty had introduced Miles to Jimi in person. The young rock god and jazz elder hit it off, the mutual fascination leading to talk about playing together. Betty's influence on Miles extended to his clothes and his drug habits: "I never took drugs. I was really into my body and I wouldn't do anything to damage myself. When I was with Miles, he was clean – he even stopped smoking. I had something to do with it, but it was his willpower," she says now. "I loved Miles's suits, but he grew fond of clothes from a place I used to shop at, Hernandos, which had Mexican designs and which would custom-make items for him."

It was also Betty who named Bitches Brew: "Miles wanted to call it Witches Brew, but I suggested Bitches Brew and he said, 'I like that.' Contrary to what some people said, there was nothing derogatory about it."

Relations between husband and wife soon soured, however. In his autobiography, Miles complained she was "too young and wild" and suspected her of having an affair with the raffish Hendrix, something she flatly denies. "I was so angry with Miles when he wrote that. It was disrespectful to Jimi and to me.

"Miles and I broke up because of his violent temper," she continues. "Other than that, it was a good experience for me because I developed creatively – Miles produced an album of mine that never came out."

Even after the pair had split at the end of 1969, they continued to see each other. "When two people are tied together you just have to find a way through it," she adds phlegmatically.

Away from Miles, Betty had her own career to build. Her eponymous first album featured a stellar line-up put together by Sly Stone drummer Greg Errico and including the Pointer Sisters on backing vocals. Its tough funk grooves were fronted by vocals that rasped, rocked and screamed with something between delight and threat.

The subsequent They Say I'm Different and Nasty Gal likewise presented her as a proud, predatory woman beholden to no man with cuts including "If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up", "He Was a Big Freak" and "Nasty Gal", the last declaring: "You dragged my name in the mud… but I used to leave you hanging in bed by your fingernails." There has been a widespread assumption that Betty's songs referred to her ex-husband (or to Hendrix) but she claims she was merely "exercising my creativity".

Despite critical acclaim, none of her albums achieved much commercial success (a fourth was never released), their cause not helped by radio's aversion to their sexual explicitness (pretty mild by today's standards), but her talent was never in doubt. "She was the first Madonna, but Madonna was like Donny Osmond by comparison," reckoned Carlos Santana.

By contrast, Miles's move into fusion won him a new generation of fans. Following 1969's transitional In a Silent Way, the electric storm of Bitches Brew in 1970 became the biggest-selling jazz album in history, shifting 500,000 copies instead of the 60,000 usually commanded by his releases.

The influence of Hendrix is all over Brew. Like Electric Ladyland, it's primarily a studio creation, complete with splices and special effects, while "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" echoes Jimi's "Voodoo Chile". In 1970, the two men even appeared on the same bill at the Isle of Wight festival before an audience of 600,000. Miles arrived on stage in a red leather jacket and blue rhinestone trousers.

Many of Miles's accomplices would go on to write their own careers in "fusion", among them Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Larry Young. For drummer Jack De Johnette, the process that created Bitches Brew, while thrilling, had human as much as artistic origins: "It was a midlife crisis played out through experimental jazz."

Bitches Brew (Legacy Edition) is out now on Sony Jazz

More on this story

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  • Miles Davis: Bitches Brew 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

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