Paying Tribute To Betty Davis

Betty Davis, born Betty Mabry, turns 70 this coming July.

A former model, she married the iconoclastic jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in 1967, and though their marriage lasted little more than a year, Davis always credited her with planting the seeds of his explorations into jazz-rock fusion by introducing him to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. After a brief return to modelling, Davis began a recording career, releasing just three albums – 1973’s Betty Davis, 1974’s They Say I’m Different and 1975’s Nasty Gal – to pretty much universal indifference, before, in 1979, dropping out of music. A fourth album, Is It Love Or Desire?, was eventually released in 2009, though it had been recorded in 1976.

Over the intervening years, however, an audience has slowly been rediscovering her extraordinary catalogue, and a few more will now get the chance to do that through an album, Ooh Yea! The Betty Davis Songbook, recorded in Sydney by Mahalia Barnes and her band, The Soul Mates, and American guitarist Joe Bonamassa.

“Honestly,” Bonamassa admits, “up until about two years ago, I wasn’t familiar with the name Betty Davis. I didn’t even know she existed, let alone put out some of the funkiest, coolest records of the '70s, so it was so awesome to learn that Mahalia was familiar with it and the band just nailed it, so I felt like on the record I had to play catch-up pretty much from the downbeat, but it was awesome. I’m very proud of the album.”

“For me,” Barnes adds, “I just think it’s really exciting and raw; she’s pretty out there, in your face and nasty and it’s fun to sing.”

As it happens, it was a session with Bonamassa’s producer, Kevin Shirley, that led to the recording of Ooh Yea!.

“We did this song, one of my songs called Feels Right, that dad [yes, Jimmy of course] decided to record as a duet, and we were lucky enough to get Joe to play on it; it must have nearly two years ago now. We were in Europe and Joe had one day off in between the hundreds of gigs that he was doing and we flew him in to the studio in Amsterdam. That was the first time Joe and I met, and I’d played one of the Betty Davis songs to Kevin as an audio reference and said, ‘I want it to be tough like this,’ and he was, like, ‘Oh, easy – this is great by the way.’ And then he called me back and was like, ‘We’ve been listening to this Betty Davis stuff – we need to do this.’ And I was ‘Absolutely, I’d love to.’”

“The joy I get out of doing these kind of projects,” Bonamassa adds, “is the fact that I’m not the guy in the suit and the sunglasses. Intrinsically I’m just a guitar player who loves to play guitar and jam along with great musicians – and this was a great opportunity for me to do just that.”