Buddy Miles, Drummer Who Played With Jimi Hendrix in the Band of Gypsys, Joins the Ancestors

Band of Gypsys promotional photo from December of 1969: Buddy Miles, Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox. Miles joined the ancestors on February, 26, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

February 29, 2008

Buddy Miles, 60, Hendrix Drummer, Dies

By JON PARELES
New York Times

Buddy Miles, the drummer in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys and a hitmaker under his own name with the song “Them Changes,” died on Tuesday at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 60.

His death was announced on his Web site, which said he had been battling congestive heart disease.

Mr. Miles played with a brisk, assertive, deeply funky attack that made him an apt partner for Hendrix. With his luxuriant Afro and his American-flag shirts, he was a prime mover in the psychedelic blues-rock of the late 1960s, not only with Hendrix but also as a founder, drummer and occasional lead singer for the Electric Flag. During the 1980s, he was widely heard as the lead voice of the California Raisins in television commercials.

George Allen Miles Jr. was born in Omaha and began playing drums as a child. An aunt gave him his nickname, after the big-band drummer Buddy Rich.

Mr. Miles was 12 years old when he joined his father’s jazz group, the Bebops. As a teenager, he also worked with soul and rhythm-and-blues acts, among them the Ink Spots, the Delfonics and Wilson Pickett. By 1967, he had moved to Chicago, where he was a founding member of the Electric Flag.

That band included a horn section and played blues, soul and rock; it made its debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released its first album in 1968. But the Electric Flag was short-lived. Mr. Miles then formed the Buddy Miles Express; its second album, “Electric Church,” was produced in part by Hendrix, whom he had met when both were sidemen on the rhythm-and-blues circuit.

Mr. Miles also appeared on two songs on “Electric Ladyland,” the groundbreaking Hendrix double album released in 1968. After Hendrix disbanded his group the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose two other members were British, he formed a new trio, Band of Gypsys, with African-American musicians, Mr. Miles and Billy Cox on bass.

On the last night of the 1960s, a New Year’s Eve show at the Fillmore East, they recorded “Band of Gypsys,” an album that included “Them Changes.”

Mr. Miles also worked in the studio with Hendrix and appears on “The Cry of Love,” which was released after Hendrix died in 1970. Mr. Miles rerecorded “Them Changes” with his own band, and it became a hit and a blues-rock staple; Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood performed it on Monday at Madison Square Garden.

Through the 1970s, Mr. Miles made albums with his own bands. He also made a live album with Carlos Santana in 1972 and sang on the 1987 Santana album “Freedom.” In all, he appeared on more than 70 albums, working with Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Barry White, John McLaughlin and George Clinton, among other musicians.

Mr. Miles served a prison term for grand theft in the late 1970s and later another term for auto theft in the early ’80s. After he emerged in 1985, advertising recharged his career. He sang lead vocals for the California Raisins, a fictional group whose Claymation commercials were so popular that they led to a string of albums. Two of them, “California Raisins” and “Meet the Raisins,” were certified platinum for shipping a million copies each.

Mr. Miles also produced commercials for Cadillac and Harley Davidson and performed on them. He and Mr. Cox recorded an album, “The Band of Gypsys Return,” in 2004. Mr. Miles continued to perform even after suffering a stroke in 2005.

He is survived by his partner, Sherrilae Chambers.