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- Jazz se BILLYCOBHAM Brings Spectrum ON W
- 18 Jazzwise ▪ July 2024Billy's Full Spectrum Dominance
- Page 3N Mahavishnu's intensity, tremendous volume, challenging time signatures and sheer velocity of execution forced Cobham, as he would later admit, to compete physically in terms of stamina and speed, his performances a vital element in the success of musicians contemplate in how-does-he-do-it wonder. With the fiftieth anniversary of the release of his hit album Spectrum last year he has once again returned to the touring circuit, and UK audiences will have an opportunity of seeing a living legend as he headlines at the Love Supreme Festival on Saturday 6 July and at his 80th birthday celebration at the EFG London Jazz Festival on Wednesday 20 November at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
- Page 4Bobby Colomby, there was a whole bunch of them, Al Foster, the list goes on, all working their way to graduation. Warren Smith was a teacher there, a great percussionist with Gil Evans. It was perfect for me, not only was it a music school but it was also an art school, so the late Jeremy Steig, known for being proficient playing the flute, was actually a painter. He was studying painting, but he was a good flute player, made some great records. In a situation like in High School, the requirement was that you play together with your colleagues, and to be really good at contributing as a participant; so therefore my foundation was very strong. They had Billy Cobham, who was a sensation, he could create these kind of pyrotechnic things people had never heard before and when Michael Brecker soloed it was so far ahead!"
- Page 5lot of time if you have a front line of - hypothetically - Joe Henderson, J.J Johnson and Freddie Hubbard. The thank-yous you get are not in words. When someone calls you on the phone and asks you, 'Are you free tomorrow for a session that starts at 10am, probably a double session, that's your thank-you for the things which you did before. They don't say, 'that sounds good, no, they ask you to come tomorrow. That's it. "After while I grew stale, and things were changing anyway because of rock n' roll, so I ended up on the road with a series of things I felt I could be a better contributor at"
- Page 6BACK WITH A BANG! Neil Cowley has decided to re-form his famous trio after performing and recording as a solo artist for seven years. Here he tells Andy Robson why, and what he hopes to achieve...
- Page 7Neil Cowley was born to a caring, nurturing mum after she had a brief affair with Max Miller's musical director. His father, who led a trio, never told his own family of their half-brother's existence. So, there were secrets within secrets for Cowley. "Every fortnight he would call from a phone box, tell me a joke and the pips would go before he got to the punch line. And every couple years we'd go to Brighton (to meet him)."
- TURNING POINT"Clark Terry's sound, his phrasing, his articulation, wasn't like anything I had ever heard before." The trumpeter and Banger Factory Records boss Mark Kavuma tells Brian Glasser that it's an album by Clark Terry and Thelonious Monk that changed his life hen I knew that I was going to do this [interview], I thought "There can only be onel'
- Album InterviewNubya Garcia Odyssey
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Bobby Colomby, there was a whole bunch of them, Al Foster, the list goes on, all working their way to graduation. Warren Smith was a teacher there, a great percussionist with Gil Evans. It was perfect for me, not only was it a music school but it was also an art school, so the late Jeremy Steig, known for being proficient playing the flute, was actually a painter. He was studying painting, but he was a good flute player, made some great records. In a situation like in High School, the requirement was that you play together with your colleagues, and to be really good at contributing as a participant; so therefore my foundation was very strong.
They had Billy Cobham, who was a sensation, he could create these kind of pyrotechnic things people had never heard before and when Michael Brecker soloed it was so far ahead!"
- Mike Mainieri on Cobham's time in the band Dreams
20 Jazzwise July 2024
"In that kind of environment you learn a lot of things and actually your teachers help you refine them because they are your colleagues. Being young, the competitive element is very high, you don't want to be following everybody else, you want to be right in the middle of it all rubbing elbows with the best. There was a jazz orchestra called the Marshall Brown Newport Youth Band, and that band was mostly made up of all the kids from my school, and they played the Newport Jazz Festival every year and you're sitting in an environment where - from my own class was Eddie, Eddie Gomez the bassist, and behind him, sitting right behind him, was Richard Ten Ryk, later known as Richard Tee who played keyboards for Paul Simon, and he also a lot with a band called Stuff - that was who he was. It was just that kind of environment, and the beauty of it all was you didn't have to pay anything to go to school there, it was one of the special schools the Mayor of New York had way back in the 1940s, a guy named Fiorello LaGuardia, and he created special schools in the humanities, in the arts, for kids into chemistry and the sciences."
Cobham graduated in 1962: "I was 18 years old, I was just looking for jobs, that's 1962, so '63, I'm still looking, just playing around with local bands and stuff like this, and taking on jobs just to help my family out as best I could until a crazy thing happened, and that was the assassination of President Kennedy. That took a toll on me, and at that time was the Vietnam war, so I knew if I didn't do something to take care of myself I would end up carrying a rifle.
"So I decided to take the examination for the United States Army Band in Washington, and I was fortunate enough to pass and join the army band. And there a lot of schooling began, because I was in the midst of a great group of musicians that also had the same idea - Cecil Bridgewater played trumpet, Grover Washington played not just saxophone but he played bass as well, and a lot arrangers and writers, making up what we needed to do to take care of the USO. It was an organisation to entertain the troops, and I was lucky enough to teach a little music in the Naval School which got me through my time.
"I left the army in January 1968, and I was on the road with Horace Silver at the end of that month until December of the same year, where the last date I played was actually at Ronnie Scott's at the end of that month after a very long tour - at least for me! I think we did 45 shows with Horace Silver and a junket of bands - Horace, Max Roach's Quartet, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a gospel group called The Stars of Faith, and the Elvin Jones Trio with Jimmy Garrison and Joe Farrell. We were all on the bus together. From England we started and had to get a ferry or fly to and from the continent. That's what I remember about that. A lot of time to pull things together, and all the people involved in those groups, either you gotta to be deaf or totally dumb if you don't get something out of that!"
On his return to the States, Cobham began taking on dates as a studio musician, as life on the road held few charms for him. Initially working for Atlantic Records, he also did a lot of work CTI Records - he was on 67 albums between 1969-73, with 20 in 1973 alone.
"In New York there was an industry known as studio musicians, and that's what I thought I wanted to do. I thought if I could excel at that I could be home each day, and that was all okay. What was beautiful about doing stuff for Creed Taylor was that we were working with musicians at a higher level of proficiency, so the chances are you're going to like the first or second solos that these guys played, no question about it, and it didn't take a whole
Top: Cobham in the studio, early 1980s; bottom: with the Mahavishnu Ochestra, 1972