Legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb, who plays at the Guinness Jazz Festival next week, tells Ray Comiskey about the making of 'Kind Of Blue'
Unless some elusive chemistry of personality or talent thrusts them stage front and centre, most drummers are defined in the public eye by the great names they've played with. For personal fame, luck helps, but mostly it's the carpe diem thing of drive and talent that marks the marks the bandleader drummers from the rest.
Think of Chick Webb, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich from the swing era, Art Blakey and Max Roach from the bop revolution, and the likes of Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams after them. For the rest, no matter how good they are, recognition is more a kind of gilt by association than anything else.
Superficially, that might also seem to be the fate of Jimmy Cobb. After all, he has played with some of the greatest names in jazz. Singers? Try Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Mark Murphy. Front-rank horn soloists? How about Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Kenny Dorham, Howard McGhee, Art Farmer, Dave Leibman and the Adderley brothers, Cannonball and Nat. And where jazz guitar is concerned, throw in the equivalent of a total eclipse, Wes Montgomery. Most famously of all, of course, he was part of the great Miles Davis sextet that made Kind Of Blue, the one jazz album that is indisputably for the ages. You don't get gilt by association more golden than that.
Yet there is much more to Cobb than a list of names he has played with, or the fact that the variety they represent shows his flexibility, sensitivity and professionalism. He may have created no stylistic revolutions like Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones or Tony Williams, but his is the art of the ensemble musician par excellence.
With pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers - we're back in Kind Of Blue territory again, if only partially - he didn't simply complete a great Miles Davis rhythm section. When they left Davis to work as a trio in the 1960s, they became the epitome of the format for that era. Among the significant things about it was the fact that each musician was crucial to its musical and popular success. There were no stars; the group was the star. Take Cobb, or anyone else, out of it, and it became a different, lesser animal.
Talking to him, it's clear he has sensible appreciation of his own considerable talent, tempered by a humorous, clear-eyed view of life. He's a warm, modest man who, you sense, is so secure in his own skin that he doesn't need to take on that of others.
Born in Washington DC in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash, he bought his first set of drums as a teenager. Apart from a few lessons with a percussionist in the National Symphony Orchestra, he had no formal training.
"Basically I used to listen to the Billy Eckstine band; Art Blakey was the drummer. I used to listen to Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Big Sid Catlett, all those guys. At that time there was a lot of transit action coming through the ghettos in each city," he says. "New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington - it was, like, four major theatres that bands could hook up with and have that little tour. And another thing. Walking down the streets you could hear the blues, gospel, jazz. In the ghetto they was playing that music all the time, so I was exposed to it and I guess it just took effect."
He got noticed fairly quickly. By the time he was 19 or 20 he had worked for Billie Holiday "in a place called the Blue Mirror in downtown Washington". At 21 he left to go on the road with the great rhythm 'n' blues altoist, Earl Bostic, and got his first big break.
The headliner on one touring package was Dinah Washington. Her pianist was 19-year-old Wynton Kelly, and with bassist Keter Betts, they became her first real trio. He remembers Kelly, who died young, as one of the greats.
"And they beginning to know that," he says, "because I keep telling 'em every chance I get. He was something extra special and any band he worked in, the music always improved."
This brings up Miles Davis and Kind Of Blue. Kelly had replaced Bill Evans in Davis's band, but Miles brought Evans back for most of the recording of that album. As the only survivor from that seminal date, how does Cobb feel about it? "Well, I don't know. It's amazing that it happened like it did," he says. "For me, when it happened that day, I realised we had made a good record but, you know, Miles made a lotta good records that stand the expansion of time."
Davis's instructions to the musicians were minimal. The pieces were little more than sketches, with some loose directions about which chords to use.
"So a lot of that stuff was modal like that, and then he would go along and tell me: 'Well, this is like straight ahead; do what you feel,'" says Cobb. "So that's basically the way I was in that band. Because I never had a rehearsal in that band. What was really nice about it is that I didn't really have to play like Philly Joe did. Because the music was changing a little bit by the time I got there. Miles was getting more into modal stuff, so in a way that all helped me because people weren't looking for me to play like Joe, which is good, because I never could've done it. Joe was one of a kind."
Bill Evans always felt that the band was happier with Wynton Kelly in the rhythm section than when he was there.
"Well, you see," Cobb responds, "Bill came in between Red Garland and Wynton, so the band was used to a certain kind of feeling. I mean, Red played things with Joe and Paul that they would play under the music, and Bill didn't have that, you know. He played altogether different. Not only that. If we was playing in the ghetto they'd say: 'What's that white boy doing up there?' Then Miles used to tell him shit like 'when a new guy comes into the band he has to make love to the band'. And Bill said 'what?' But Miles was kidding - and Bill didn't know how to take that. So I'd say that's another thing.
"Then another time we'd be sitting in the car having some kind of conversation about anything, and Bill would try to interject something about it and Miles would say 'just hold on, man; we don't want no white opinions'. So Bill didn't no how to take that either - 'oh, man, let me outa here'."
In fairness to Davis, he defended his choice of Evans no matter where they played. And Davis's great collaborations with the white composer/arranger, Gil Evans, is evidence of his musical colour-blindness. But he did have a cruel streak that was never far from the surface.
Nowadays, Jimmy Cobb is an elder statesman who, in the words of his bandleader at the Guinness Jazz Festival, Hendrik Meurkens, "can still kick ass". He has recorded with such younger- generation musicians as guitarist Peter Bernstein and pianist Brad Mehldau - which brings us back to Wynton Kelly.
"Well, Brad liked Wynton, because most piano players, they have to come by Wynton some kind of way. There's no way you can play the piano and not think something about Wynton."
Just as there's no way you can think of an all-American bop rhythm section and not come up with Jimmy Cobb.
Jimmy Cobb plays at the Guinness Jazz Festival with Hendrik Meurkens's quintet next Friday and Saturday