Major
record labels have made some baffling decisions. A case in point would be their
refusal to sign funk firebrand Betty Davis to a long-term contract, because her
performance persona was too overtly sexual. Seriously, they couldn’t figure out
how to market sex? Her ex-husband Miles Davis described her as “Madonna before
Madonna. Prince before Prince.” Yes, that Miles Davis. Her tenure in the public
spotlight was limited, but she made quite an impression on listeners during
that time. Phil Cox tries to track down the long-off-the-radar Davis in Betty Davis: They Say I’m Different,
which releases today on DVD.
Betty
Mabry came from Pittsburgh to New York hoping to forge a musical career, but
she initially paid the bills as a model. It wasn’t such a bad day job, since it
gave her access to the world of movers and shakers. She was not so much into
jazz, but jazz trumpeters were another story. For a while she was romantically
linked to Hugh Masekela (strangely overlooked in Cox’s film), who produced her
Columbia 45 sessions, before her whirlwind romance and stormy marriage with
Miles Davis.
Cox
(with the help of experts like musician Greg Tate) fully explores her role as
the inspiration and catalyst for Miles Davis’s turn towards electric fusion,
but they do not let him overshadow her own music. It is definitely funky and
highly sexualized, even by today’s standards. Frankly, it seems strange that
she never developed a wider cult audience or became a significant source of
memes. Her song “Nasty Gal” predated Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” by at least a
decade and it was considerably nastier. Instead, her music is currently available
on reissues from the specialized collectors’ label, A Light in the Attic.
They Say is only fifty-four
minutes, but it is easy to see why it came in on the short end of the spectrum.
One presumes Cox was hoping for a third act comeback, much in the tradition of Searching for Sugar Man, but Davis makes
it abundantly clear that is not about to happen. In fact, we only sort of see
Davis in a DVD extra interview, throughout which Cox dutifully shoots her from
the back.
So
no, there’s not a lot of crowd-pleasing drama going on here, but at least Davis
gets her overdue ovation. We can’t ask much more from Cox, because he lets us
hear from Davis directly and groove to her music at length. He does pretty well
by his subject and the audience, incorporating some cool archival footage,
distinctive animated interludes, and cinematic aerial buffer shots. Fans of
funk, R&B, and jazz should definitely check it out to fill in some gaps
their musical picture of the 1970s. Betty
Davis: They Say I’m Different releases today on DVD, from MVD.
