Here's an article I wrote for the upcoming issue of SEE Magazine here in Edmonton — it's a profile of jazz legend Jimmy Cobb, who's best known as the drummer on Miles Davis' classic album Kind of Blue. It's the record's 50th anniversary this year, and Cobb is currently touring North America with his "So What" Band. The centrepiece of the show is a live recreation of Kind of Blue, and Cobb says that if the audience responds well, the band throws in a few extra Davis songs as a reward. He plays Edmonton on July 4, and it should be quite a show. * * * * *
Jimmy Cobb is 80 years old and he’s been playing music for almost all of them. When he was just 18 years old, he was backing up Billie Holiday, and he could fill up an entire interview just talking about being a young jazz drummer in the ’40s and ’50s, knocking around his hometown of Washington, D.C., playing in a quartet with Frank Wess, a quintet with Charlie Rouse, and going on the road with Earl Bostic and Dinah Washington. He keeps up an active recording and touring schedule even today. (“You have to be in shape to drum like me,” he says. “I play hard and strong, so I have to be hard and strong.”) So it must be vexing that the only thing it seems people want to hear about is what happened in a recording studio over a couple of days in 1959.
Of course, when those sessions produce an album like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, you can’t blame folks for being a little curious. Kind of Blue is the Citizen Kane of jazz — the album that routinely gets voted the greatest jazz record ever made, and probably the best-selling one as well, a rare case of critical acclaim and mass popularity overlapping perfectly. Along with Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, it’s the jazz album even non-jazz fans can be counted on to have in their record collection; few sounds instantly set a mood of effortless, sophisticated cool like those chords at the start of “So What.”
Jimmy Cobb is the last surviving link to the creation of that casual, almost accidental masterpiece, and he has been for a while: Miles Davis died in 1991, saxophonists John Coltrane in 1967 and Cannonball Adderly in 1975, pianists Bill Evans in 1980 and Wynton Kelly in 1971, and bassist Paul Chambers in 1969. He’s become the custodian of Kind of Blue’s legacy almost by default — he’s currently marking the album’s 50th anniversary by recreating it live with a group he calls The "So What" Band — but he remains modest about his own contributions.
“I’ve had people tell me that if [Miles Davis’ longtime drummer] Philly Joe Jones had done it, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Cobb says, “because he played a different way. I don’t know. To me, with all those guys around you, anybody could have done it. That’s basically how I look at it. A lot of drummers could have done that. I was just fortunate enough to have been there at the right time and to have come up with what needed to be come up with. I figure I’m a lucky guy.”
Cobb even downplays his contributions to the album’s musical innovations, such as its popularization of so-called “modal jazz,” a liberating approach to composition which required musicians to improvise over a few simple scales instead of chords. “Modal jazz wasn’t that much of a challenge to a drummer,” Cobb says. “You just had to keep time and stay true to the mood of the music. The heat was on the other players, having to improvise over just a few chords and a few scales — it was a lot harder for them than me. The drummer doesn’t have to change his stripes, you know? You just pull it in when you have to and let it out when you have to.”
Cobb admits it can get a little overbearing at times having to tell the same stories about Kind of Blue over and over again, but he also recognizes that having played on that album opens up a lot of doors — what young musician wouldn’t want to play with Jimmy Cobb and hear all those firsthand stories about Davis and Coltrane? (“I get all the action!” Cobb says.)
Like every other jazz fan, Cobb listens to Kind of Blue all the time. He says he wouldn’t change a moment of it, not even the mistakes. Wait — there are mistakes on Kind of Blue? “I made one mistake on it,” he says. “There’s a cymbal crash I made on ‘So What’ going into the solos, but it turned out to be what people liked about it. So I figure, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. Whatever happened there — that’s fate.”
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