It’s one of life’s ironies that an artist as independent and ahead of her time as Betty Davis (Mabry) is today remembered mostly for her brief marriage to Miles Davis, and for having transformed the trumpeter in record time from Italian suited jazzer to psychedelically garbed imbiber of Bitches Brew. (Davis credited Betty with introducing him both to hip threads and the sounds of Hendrix, Sly Stone, and others.) Chump change indeed for a singer, songwriter, model/fashionista, and provocateur who was a Greenwich Village scene maker while still in her teens. She wrote “Uptown (To Harlem)” for the Chambers Brothers, and later went on to release three unheralded records of low-down ‘70s funk whose open sexual attitudes prefigured later, more commercially successful efforts by Rick James, Prince, and Madonna.