The song Mademoisellle Mabry was named after Betty Mabry, who Miles Davis married in September 1968. She appears on the cover of the album. This relationship sparked a transition in Davis’ music that ushered in a new musical direction: Jazz-Rock Fusion. During their short time together, Betty Davis had a tremendous influence Miles Davis’ sense of style and musical experimentation. He wrote in his autobiography, “Betty was a free-spirit, talented as a motherfucker.”
Betty Mabry was born in Durham, North Carolina. At the age of 12, her family moved to Pittsburgh. Four years later, she left the Steel City and moved to New York City to enroll in the Fashion Institute of Technology.
She quickly immersed herself in the culture of Greenwich Village and worked as a successful model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Elle, Ebony, and Glamour magazines. During this time, she met several musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. However, it was her relationship with Miles Davis, which began in the spring of 1968, that propelled her to stardom and gave her access to his band and Columbia’s recording studio.
In May 1969, Miles Davis and Teo Macero produced two legendary recording sessions at Columbia’s 52nd St. Studios in New York. The band consisted of Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer), John McLaughlin (guitar), Herbie Hancock (keyboards), Billy Cox (Band of Gypsy’s bassist), Wayne Shorter (sax), and Larry Young (organ). In nearly 50 years, those jams had never been officially released or even bootlegged. However, in 2016, the sessions were finally released by Light in the Attic Records. Here’s a short video about that release.
It was Betty Davis, by introducing him to the popular music of Hendrix and Stone, who pushed Miles Davis toward recording the seminal Jazz-Rock fusion albums Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, and finally his tour de force Bitches Brew.
In June and September of 1968, Miles Davis recorded Filles de Kilimanjaro, one of my favorite albums. According to music critic Stephen Erlewine, “What makes this album so fascinating is that it’s possible to hear the breaking point - though his quintet all followed him into fusion (three of his supporting players were In a Silent Way), it’s possible to hear them all break with the conventional notions of what constitutes even adventurous jazz, turning into something new.”
To me, Mademoiselle Mabry, particularly during Wayne Shorter’s tenor solo, sounds like a song you might hear on something like Weather Report’s 1977 classic Heavy Weather - just replace Dave Holland’s acoustic with Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass and you are there. Although credited to Davis, the song is a reworking by Gil Evans of Jimi Hendrix’s song The Wind Cries Mary. Evidently, Davis and Evans had met with Hendrix several times to exchange ideas.
If Filles de Kilimanjaro started the reaction, by the February 1969 recording of In A Silent Way, the fusion of jazz and rock was complete.
In January of 1969, Davis’ working band was incredible: Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on electric piano, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. However, for his next album, In A Silent Way, recorded in February, he replaced DeJohnette with Tony Williams and added two more electric pianos with Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul, and also added electric guitarist John McLaughlin.
This album had a profound impact not only on Jazz, but on the futuristic music of the second half of the 20th century. In it, I find the early beginnings of Jazz-Fusion and ambiant music, where the music becomes sounds related to a sense of place, a landscape, or an environment. Brian Enos was a big Miles Davis fan, whose music played a role in the development of Enos collaboration with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on their 1973 release (No Pussyfooting). Here’s a short trailer for that album.
In the liner notes on his 1982 Ambient 4: On Land, Brian Eno wrote that “He Loved Him Madly” from Davis’ early 70s compilation album “Get Up With It” (1974) and Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” (1973) were major inspirations for his album. Clearly, you can also hear that influence from the beginning and ending sections of In A Silent Way:
While the track In A Silent Way is credited to Joe Zawinul and It’s About That Time is credited to Davis, I think it’s all Zawinul. Again, listening to It’s About That Time, I hear Zawinul in there. For example, notice starting at the 8:18 minute mark, I hear some riffs in there from Weather Report’s later classic Birdland.
Recorded just days after the Woodstock festival, in the summer of 1969, Bitches Brew is clearly informed by the spirit of the times. It has become known as one of jazz’s greatest albums, defining the jazz-rock genre. Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau called it, “good music that’s very much like jazz and something like rock.” It won the 1971 Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album and by 1976 became Davis’ first gold album. Many believe this album helped bring jazz back to mainstream listeners, who had been slowly drifting away to rock music.
Miles Runs the Voodoo Down is my favorite track from the original album. I think this is some of John McLaughlin’s finest guitar work.
After Bitches Brew, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, the two key creative members of Davis’ band, left to form their own band - Weather Report.
Weather Report
I remember in 1976 or so back in high school, while doing my homework at the dining room table and listening to my portable radio – it might have been a transistor, but I can’t remember – when Weather Report’s Badia came on. That song stopped me in my tracks. Wow. What was that?
A few years later, when I got my driver’s license, I remember getting the 8-track, popping it in the player, and driving around town listening to it over and over.
Playing Badia, Freezing Fire, Five Short Stories back to back to back is Jazz-Fusion at its best. Here’s Five Short Stories, written by Zawinul and includes, I think, some of Wayne Shorter’s best tenor playing.
Among all the jazz-fusion bands formed by musicians who played in Miles Davis’ bands, like Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report is the most accomplished. Of all their output, Tale Spinnin’ is an overlooked gem and my personal favorite. A close second might be 8:30, the live album recorded and released in the summer of 1979, primarily for the bass of Jaco Pastorius. The album ended up winning the 1979 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance, Vocal or Instrumental.
Weather Report’s debut album came out in 1971, just about one year after the release of Davis’ Bitches Brew. Two of the founding members, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, came from that band; however, the third founding member was a bass player from Prague, Miroslav Vitous.
Vitous won a music contest in Vienna that offered him a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. His debut album Infinite Search was recorded in the fall of 1969 for the Embryo label and featured some of Miles Davis’ band members. To get a feel for his bass, listen to this song from that album. The following year, he joined up with Zawinul and Shorter and together they formed Weather Report.
I think Weather Report, more than any other band, defined modern jazz and helped bring jazz back to more popular audiences. In fact, they did a much better job of it than Miles Davis. No doubt, Davis’ On the Corner has over the years gained in popularity; although, when it was released in 1972, it was a commercial disaster and one of his worst selling albums. According to music critic Paul Tingen, it became “the most vilified and controversial album in the history of jazz.” However, it is now rightly recognized as the dance, post-punk, hip hop music that it actually is.
On the Corner
When speaking of On the Corner, Miles Davis wasn’t quiet about his intentions to broaden his audience. In his Autobiography he wrote, “It was with On the Corner and Big Fun that I really made an effort to get my music over to young black people. They are the ones who buy records and come to concerts, and I had started thinking about building a new audience for the future.” Apart from employing Motown bassist Michael Henderson, he included more funk and R&B elements than ever before, citing Sly Stone and James Brown among his popular music influences.
For these reasons, it has been well-documented that if there was ever a Miles Davis record that the jazz establishment simply couldn’t dig, it was On The Corner. “It means nothing; there is no form, no content, and it barely swings,” grumbled Stan Getz. However, funk and R&D elements were not the only influences on the album. Davis also credits an unlikely inspiration, the experimental classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
According to Davis, “I had always written in a circular way. And through Stockhausen I could see that I didn’t want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs: they just keep going on. Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.”
You can pretty much hear all these influences on the title track from the album. Nice and funky and long:
Paul Buckmaster met Miles Davis in 1969, when Davis was performing in London. According to Davis:
“Paul [Buckmaster] was into Bach and so I started paying attention to Bach while Paul was around. I had begun to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or four ways, independently of each other were true because Bach had also composed that way. What I was playing on On the Corner has no label, although people thought it was funk because they didn’t know what else to call it. It was actually a combination of some of the concepts of Paul Buckmaster, Sly Stone, James Brown, and Stockhausen, some of the concepts I had absorbed from Ornette’s music, as well as my own.”
In April 1972, Davis invited Buckmaster to come to New York to help him work on a new recording. Shortly thereafter, he moved into Davis’s house for a few months, sleeping on his couch. He brought with him a record by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen that included the pieces Gruppen and one of the earliest works for orchestra and live electronics, Mixtur. On the Corner was recorded less than two months after Davis’s first brush with Stockhausen’s music, and yet he cites it as an influence. Well, I have to say that I do not hear any similarities between Davis and Stockhausen, except that the songs are really long….
One more thing, before we portage our canoe for this week. In the spring of 1973, Miles Davis trimmed his band down to seven players and fronted it with Chicago guitarist Pete Cosey.
Cosey was an early member of Chicago's AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and a group with drummer Maurice White and bassist Louis Satterfield that eventually evolved into Earth, Wind & Fire. Prior to playing with Davis, Cosey played with Phil Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble and was a busy session guitarist with Chess Records, playing on records by Etta James, Fontella Bass (Rescue Me), Rotary Connection, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters.
This new Miles Davis band was at their best live, and their ferocious “acid-funk” improvisations can best be heard on the live double albums Dark Magus, Agharta and Pangaea.
Here’s one more for the road. Recollections was not released on the original Bitches Brew album. It was released on the 2000 Big Fun double CD, a collection of unreleased tracks recorded for Columbia sessions between 1969 and 1972. This track was recorded in February of 1970, during the Bitches Brew sessions. It might be my favorite Miles Davis song and has a nice drone music feel that I know “The Blindman” out in Mill Valley will enjoy:
Next week, we’ll follow the music of another ex-Davis band member, percussionist James Mtume, as we continue to paddle down that Big River Called Jazz.…
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Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….
Jazz-Fusion
Thanks, Tyler. Bitches Brew is usually where I end my journey and feel like jazz ended (with exceptions for the young lions that came later and played in a more traditional style). I’ll have to give it a listen, but in private!