BUDDY MILES 1947–2008 Them Changes text Ronnie Reese photography Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “Buddy Miles is going to do this thing he wrote called ‘Them Changes.’” –Jimi Hendrix with the Band of Gypsys, January 1, 1970 Buddy Miles helped define the fusion genre. If Sly Stone was the centerpiece of a late-’60s revolution that saw an amalgama- tion of styles like never before, then Miles was just as integral a part—the blues to Jimi Hendrix’s rock and roll, to the R&B of Funkadelic, to Santana’s Latin, and to Miles Davis’s jazz. And as perhaps the only artist in history who has performed with each of the aforementioned pioneers, he was the thread by which they were all connected. Born George Allen Miles Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 5, 1947, Miles was the son of a jazz bassist. A natural musician as a youngster, Miles drummed with his father’s band and a number of well-established acts throughout his teens. At nineteen, while performing with Wilson Pickett at disc jockey Murray Kaufman’s “Easter Show” revue in New York City, he caught the attention of blues guitar virtuoso Michael Bloomfield and keyboardist Barry Goldberg, who were looking to put together a brass-heavy stateside band that represented all aspects of musical Americana. Legend has it that the two filled the teenager with Oreo cookies and visions of lovely San Francisco lasses until Miles decided to leave Pickett and join what would soon become the Electric Flag: An American Music Band. With the Electric Flag, Miles would emerge as the group’s de
facto artistic director and a monster live performer. A dulcet but powerful tenor and fatback drumming combined to form his sig- nature sound, which was developed even further while fronting the Buddy Miles Express after the Flag’s dissolution, which had begun with Bloomfield’s departure in 1968. In 1969, in the midst of his first official stint as a bandleader, and already a highly sought-after jam-session regular, Miles was summoned by his friend, the iconic Hendrix, to become part of a new project—a forward-looking restructuring of the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the Band of Gypsys. “It’s, like, for me, one of the many things in my life that I can really say that I really am just so proud of,” Miles told Bob Davis of Soul-Patrol.com during a 2006 interview. “Because Jimi Hendrix and myself—James Marshall Hendrix—we were very, very close. If I were to ask why he felt the way that he did about me, I guess because he thought that I fit what he wanted to do.” Much like his time in the Electric Flag, Miles’s tenure with the Band of Gypsys was short-lived, yet interest in his prodigious talent never waned. He would continue to produce and record through- out the ’70s with his own groups and in collaboration with a virtual who’s who of rock, jazz, and R&B until legal troubles and bouts with addiction took their toll, resulting in a period of incarceration as the decade came to a close. Undeterred, Miles kept performing as an inmate and, in the years following his release, resumed his career, reaching yet another peak in lending his vocals to the wildly successful California Raisins advertising campaign of 1987. Over the next twenty years, Miles remained on the scene but never fully in the spotlight—an ideal setting for a man whose mas- sive frame matched the scope of his humility, and one who served as a prophet for so many. “When I’m on that stage,” said Miles to Soul-Patrol’s Davis in 2006, “that is my way of saying, ‘Thank you, dear Lord…I am a sultan to do Your work.’ ” Buddy Miles died of congestive heart failure on Tuesday, Febru- ary 26, 2008. He was sixty. .
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