Consummate jazz drummer made his name on seminal Miles Davis recordings
Jimmy Cobb, who has died aged 91, was a jazz drummer who helped drive Miles Davis’ masterpiece Kind of Blue ,an album that became one of the topselling jazz recordings of all time. In a career spanning nearly seven decades, Cobb was regarded as a consummate accompanist of understated vibrancy. That warmth and deceptively relaxed approach drew the admiration of Davis, who hired Cobb in 1958 as part of a world-class ensemble that included saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian ‘‘Cannonball’’ Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and pianist Bill Evans (and later Wynton Kelly).
Cobb was the last surviving member of the group known for its groundbreaking fusion of minimalism and improvisation. Over two recording sessions for Columbia Records in early 1959, Davis would hand out the sketchiest of outlines for the music and leave the rest to extemporisation. ‘‘He’d say, ‘This is a ballad. I want it to sound like it’s floating,’ ’’ Cobb recalled 60 years later.
The album’s release that August featured five tunes that became jazz classics: So What?, Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, All Blues and Flamenco Sketches. They were exemplars of ‘‘modal jazz’’ improvisation based on scales instead of the chord progression found in Tin Pan Alley or blues standards.
Kind of Blue ushered in what jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern called ‘‘the beginning of a change in the jazz mainstream’’, forming a bridge from the explosive bebop popularised by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to a cooler, more introspective approach to the music. ‘‘The album,’’ Morgenstern added, ‘‘was received very warmly, but it was many years before it was fully appreciated for having fully brought together [several] trends in jazz. But its appeal is that it’s very accessible, in a way very romantic in its mood-setting. That’s what got it to so many different kinds of audiences, and that’s why it’s achieved this landmark stature.’’
The album sold more than five million copies. Rolling Stone ranked it 12th on its list of greatest albums of all time, and musicians as varied as Quincy Jones and Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen considered the Davis recording an apex of the jazz form.
The musicians were paid as freelancers, and Cobb said he received a union-scale rate of $150. At the time, he told The Independent, he considered it a fair wage and said neither he nor the other players had any glimmering it would do as well as it did.
‘‘That never came up,’’ he said. ‘‘It was just another great Miles Davis recording and that everybody played well on. If Miles even had an inkling that that was happening, he would have asked for a truckload of money and four Ferraris sitting outside. That’s the way he thought about things.’’
James Wilbur Cobb was born in Washington and raised by his mother, a shortorder cook. He developed an interest in drumming at 15. ‘‘A guy in my neighbourhood, whose hobby was drums, used to hang out at our house during the day,’’ he told the Hartford Courant. ‘‘We used to listen to records and bang on the table with our knuckles and forks and stuff to the rhythm of the records.’’
His mother found him work as a dishwasher and busboy so he could pay for his first drum set. He would practise at Saturday-night dances held on his grandfather’s tobacco farm outside Washington, playing with a band featuring saxophonist Buck Hill.
At 18, he played at the Blue Mirror club in Washington, backing up singer Billie Holiday. His memories of her remained vivid decades later: ‘‘She used to say, ‘Youngblood, help me zip up my corset.’ ’’ The engagement was a breakthrough that led to work in the early 1950s with Earl Bostic’s band and then with singer Dinah Washington, to whom he was romantically attached.
It was Adderley who brought Cobb to Davis’ attention at a time when Davis’ previous drummer was in the throes of drug addiction. Davis was in need of a dependable musician who also had a more delicate approach, given his plans for Kind of Blue.
‘‘I was probably the soberest one in the band,’’ Cobb told The Village Voice. ‘‘And he knew I was going to be on time. And he knew when I got there, I would give 150 per cent. So like that, you know. That’s the pluses I had.’’
He was in Manhattan when he got a call from Davis at 6.30pm, asking whether he could join him on the bandstand at 9 – in Boston. ‘‘I said, ‘Nine o’clock? How am I going to get to Boston by nine o’clock, man?’ He said, ‘Man, you want the gig, don’t you?’ I say, ‘Yeah, man.’ I say, ‘OK, I’ll get there as fast as I can.’ ’’
After Kind of Blue, Cobb was a mainstay of several Davis albums, including Sketches of Spain (1960) as well as Someday My Prince Will Come (1960) and Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall (1962). He left the group in 1963 and continued a hectic recording schedule with the Wynton Kelly Trio and guitarist Wes Montgomery, among dozens of others.
Cobb toured with singer Sarah Vaughan for much of the 1970s and played with pianist Hank Jones and bassist Eddie Gomez in an ensemble called the Great Jazz Trio. He also started a teaching career that included stints at Stanford University.
In the 1990s, he shed his relative anonymity as a sideman to lead studio and touring groups, sometimes billed as Jimmy Cobb’s Mob, and he continued to appear at clubs and jazz festivals through recent years. In 2009, he was designated a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters.
Cobb often said the key to maintaining a strong rapport with Davis – on record or in person – was exuding a good-humoured nimbleness of mind. Davis, he recalled to the publication Jazzwax, used to invoke bandmate Kelly: ‘‘Man, I sure wish I could swing like Wynton.’’
‘‘I looked at him and said, ‘I sure wish you could, too, Miles.’ ’’ – Washington Post
‘‘If Miles even had an inkling that that was happening, he would have asked for a truckload of money and four Ferraris sitting outside.’’ Jimmy Cobb on the unexpected success of Kind of Blue