18 Jazzwise ▪ July 2024
Billy's Full
Spectrum Dominance
Remarkably, Billy Cobham turned 80 in May but
- with a busy year of touring including a headline spot at this year's Cheltenham Jazz Festival -you wouldn't know it. Ahead of all that, he opens up to Stuart Nicholson in an exclusive interview, covering his early life in military bands, tours with Horace Silver, getting fired from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and his classic jazz-rock album Spectrum was fired from Mahavishnu," says drum legend Billy Cobham matter-of-factly. After the band played Detroit on 23 December 1973, the musicians went their separate ways. McLaughlin, chastened by the experience, set about regrouping in early 1974.
"It was time for me to be gone," continues Cobham. "Even though I was told I was going to be in the band, the next thing I knew my last cheque bounced, and I got a message saying, 'you're no longer with us'; that's the way management works, and still does today I guess."
It was a strange ending for a band whose music had, in the space of three short years, redefined the possibilities of jazz-rock. While guitarist John McLaughlin brought a stunning technique and a deep harmonic understanding to the music - "I was conscious of what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to play, nobody else was doing," he told weekly newspaper Melody Maker - Billy Cobham was similarly taking jazz drumming to the next level. If Tony Williams had been the drummer of the 1960s, then Cobham raised the bar with performances such as 'Meeting of the Spirits' from Mahavishnu's debut Inner Mounting Flame and 'One Word' from follow-up Birds of Fire, become the undisputed drummer of the 1970s.
That's how Weather Report came together, that's how Mahavishnu came together, that's how Eleventh House came together - just co-operations just for the hell of it, and for the love it //