[msb-alumni] Jimmy Cobb, 91, Last Surviving Musician on "Kind of Blue" Died on May 24, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 May 2020 14:23:54 -0400
BlankJimmy Cobb, 91, Last Surviving Musician on 'Kind of Blue'. By Giovanni
Russonello.
The last surviving member of that landmark album's sextet, he was a master of
understatement, propelling his bandmates with a quiet persistence.
Jimmy Cobb, a jazz drummer whose propulsive ride cymbal imbued countless
classic
recordings with a quiet intensity, including Miles Davis's epochal album 'Kind
of
Blue,' died on Sunday in Harlem. He was 91. The cause was lung cancer,
according to
his daughter Serena Cobb.
As the only surviving member of the 'Kind of Blue' sextet, Mr. Cobb had long
been
hailed as the last apostle of a defining moment in American music. His great
talent
was his ability to play understatedly, almost casually, without letting the
beat or
the momentum sag. He rarely took a solo.
"I was just trying to get it done," he said in a 2010 interview with the
National
Endowment for the Arts, adding, "You have to be at the right place at the right
time
with the right stuff, and then you got a chance."
On spirited performances led by the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, whispery
jazz
standards sung by Sarah Vaughan, dreamier late-career collaborations with the
pianist
Geri Allen, and thousands of albums and gigs in between, Mr. Cobb goaded his
bandmates by holding steady. In his hands, persistence didn't mean insisting,
and an
even keel never felt like a bore.
Released in 1959, "Kind of Blue" -- with Mr. Davis's trumpet backed by
Cannonball
Adderley and John Coltrane on saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Bill Evans and
Wynton
Kelly on piano, and Mr. Cobb on drums -- received warm reviews, but its
immortality
accrued only over time. Through changes in fashion and dips in jazz's
popularity, its
brooding, translucent aura has never gone out of style. It is widely known as
the
best-selling album in jazz history, and last year the Recording Industry
Association
of America announced that it had surpassed five million copies sold worldwide.
For most of its tunes, Mr. Davis brought in only rough sketches of melody; all
but
one of its five tracks were recorded in single takes.
Mr. Davis's advice for his drummer at those sessions was simple.
"He said, "Jimmy, you know what to do. Just make it sound like it's floating,"
Mr.
Cobb recalled.
He remained in Mr. Davis's band for over four years and contributed to other
landmark
recordings: "Porgy and Bess," "Sketches of Spain," "Someday My Prince Will
Come" and
more.
In 2003, listening to a set of live recordings from 1961, Ben Ratliff of The
New York
Times celebrated Mr. Davis's rhythm section -- Mr. Kelly, Mr. Chambers and Mr.
Cobb -- as 'the gold standard for straight-ahead, postwar jazz rhythm. Even
after
they had all left Mr. Davis's band, that core trio continued playing together
until
Mr. Chambers's death in 1969.
Mr. Cobb knew what moved him, and what didn't. When jazz turned toward the
avant-garde in the 1960s, he stayed on course, relying on his regal status to
find
work with giants of the hard-bop era, often in Europe and Japan, after the
clubs
scene in New York had dried up.
Though he never hungered for the spotlight, Mr. Cobb did embrace a leadership
role in
his last decades, often fronting bands under the name Cobb's Mob.
In a Times review of Mr. Cobb's 2014 album, "The Original Mob," Nate Chinen
took note
of the "indefinable but unmistakable pull in the ride cymbal beat of the jazz
drummer
Jimmy Cobb, who's now 85 and sounds not unlike he did at 30."
The national endowment named Mr. Cobb a Jazz Master in 2009, the year he turned
80.
In addition to his daughter Serena, Mr. Cobb is survived by his wife, Eleana
Tee
Cobb, and another daughter, Jaime Cobb.
James Wilbur Cobb was born on Jan. 20, 1929, at his home in Washington. His
parents,
Wilbur and Katherine (Bivens) Cobb, lived just blocks from U Street, which had
recently become the center of the country's most robust urban black middle
class, as
well as one of its greatest music scenes. His mother was a domestic worker, his
father a security guard and taxi driver. The couple separated when their
children
were young, and to help support his mother, Jimmy worked from an early age:
shining
shoes, delivering newspapers, toting heavy bags of ice for $5 a day. He spent
summers
working on his grandfather's tobacco farm in Maryland.
He fell in love with the drums as a teenager, listening to modern-jazz records
with a
friend and using his knuckles to hammer out rhythms. Before his 20th birthday,
he was
working at clubs on U Street, sometimes accompanying stars who passed through
town,
like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker.
Mr. Cobb first went on the road with the saxophonist Earl Bostic, then joined
the
vocalist Dinah Washington's band, which was as loaded with talented young
instrumentalists as Mr. Bostic's had been.
Ms. Washington and Mr. Cobb began a romantic relationship and lived together
for a
time. Soon after they split up, he began to fill in here and there for Mr.
Davis's
first-call drummer, Philly Joe Jones.
Then one day in 1958, Mr. Davis called Mr. Cobb at his home in Queens about 6
p.m.
and asked him if he could make a gig that night.
"I say, 'Yeah, where?" Mr. Cobb recalled.
"He say, 'Boston."
Mr. Cobb packed his drums and hustled to La Guardia Airport. He caught a plane
and
arrived at the club just as the band was starting to play "Round Midnight."
Mr. Davis's classic arrangement of that tune has a sequence of rhythmic hits in
the
middle, pinching the tension before things open up into steady swing. With the
band
making its way through the first half of the piece, Mr. Cobb set up his drums
just in
time to nail those hits.
"When they got to this certain part," he recalled, "I played this little break
with
them, and I was in the band. No rehearsal, no nothing."
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