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| 3.324 Ft
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| 1. | Stella By Starlight
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| 2. | Autumn Leaves
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| 3. | New Waltz
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| 4. | Bouncing With Bud
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| 5. | 'Round Midnight
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| 6. | And Then Again
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| 7. | I Thought About You
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| 8. | Someday My Prince Will Come
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Jazz / Fusion, Post-Bop
Billy Cobham drums
Kenny Barron piano
Ron Carter bass
A state-of-the-art piano trio album played by musicians who are supreme masters of their instruments – Kenny Barron on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Billy Cobham on drums. On this superb live recording the trio impart vibrant new life and vitality into immortal Jazz standards. The musicians draw tremendous inspiration from one another in what is quite clearly the perfect jazz partnership.
Billy Cobham's first acoustic album in decades is also the first installment of Cobham's The Art of Jazz series, dedicated to acoustic settings. After tremendous success in Europe, it is finally available in North America! Received **** from Fono Forum. Promotion by Jim Eigo.
Billy Cobham formed the Art of Three with fellow seasoned artists Kenny Barron and Ron Carter, who had known each other for several decades prior to this 2001 European tour, but had rarely played as a unit. This CD includes excerpts of two concerts, and while the drummer is listed as the leader, this is essentially a meeting of three all-stars with no one player dominating the spotlight. Beginning with a spry "Stella by Starlight," featuring Barron's playful piano, Carter's inventive accompaniment, and Cobham starting on brushes and switching to sticks, the trio sizzles from the very start. Carter's "New Waltz" is a tender tune, suggesting a parent teaching a young child a few basic dance steps in the intimacy of home. Barron's lively "And Then Again" blends a delicious bop line in the style of Bud Powell, with Carter and Cobham fueling his flight, while they also offer a rollicking treatment of Powell's "Bouncing with Bud." The setting of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" focuses more on the lyricism of the piece than an overly brooding air, as it is often played. It's hard not to think of Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, or Bill Evans when a jazz group plays "Someday My Prince Will Come," but this trio adds a catchy introduction that combines beauty with a bit of tension before seguing into the familiar waltz tempo of this Disney-associated theme. The group followed up this excellent CD with two more from a tour of Japan in 2003; the obvious chemistry between them merits future reunions as well. ~ Ken Dryden, Rovi
Billy Cobham
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: May 16, 1944 in Panama
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Jazz-Funk, Fusion, Post-Bop, Jazz-Rock
Generally acclaimed as fusion's greatest drummer, Billy Cobham's explosive technique powered some of the genre's most important early recordings -- including groundbreaking efforts by Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra -- before he became an accomplished bandleader in his own right. At his best, Cobham harnessed his amazing dexterity into thundering, high-octane hybrids of jazz complexity and rock & roll aggression. He was capable of subtler, funkier grooves on the one hand, and awe-inspiring solo improvisations on the other; in fact, his technical virtuosity was such that his flash could sometimes overwhelm his music. After debuting as a leader with the classic Spectrum in 1973, Cobham spent most of fusion's glory days recording for Atlantic; briefer stints on CBS, Elektra, and GRP followed, and by the mid-'80s, Cobham was de-emphasizing his own bands in favor of session and sideman work. Even so, he continued to record for various small labels with some regularity.
William C. Cobham was born May 16, 1944, in Panama, where as a very young child he became fascinated with the percussion instruments his cousins played. When Cobham was three, his family moved to New York City, and at age eight he made his performance debut with his father. He honed his percussion skills in a drum-and-bugle corps outfit called the St. Catherine's Queensmen, and attended New York's prestigious High School of Music and Art, graduating in 1962. From 1965 to 1968, he served as a percussionist in the U.S. Army Band, and after his release, he was hired as the new drummer in hard bop pianist Horace Silver's band. Cobham toured the U.S. and Europe with Silver in 1968, and also moonlighted with Stanley Turrentine, Shirley Scott, and George Benson. After eight months with Silver, Cobham departed to join the early jazz-rock combo Dreams in 1969, which also featured the Brecker brothers and guitarist John Abercrombie. From there, he landed a job in Miles Davis' new fusion ensemble, and played a small part in the seminal Bitches Brew sessions; he also appeared more prominently on several other Davis albums of the time, including more aggressive classics like Live-Evil and A Tribute to Jack Johnson.
Cobham and guitarist John McLaughlin split off from Davis' group to pursue a harder rocking brand of fusion in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which debuted in 1971 with the seminal The Inner Mounting Flame. With Mahavishnu, Cobham's fiery intensity was given its fullest airing yet, and his extraordinary technique influenced not only countless fusioneers in his wake, but also quite a few prog rock drummers who were aiming for similarly challenging musical territory. The 1972 follow-up Birds of Fire cemented his reputation, and by this time he had also become something of an unofficial in-house drummer for Creed Taylor's CTI label, known for a smoother, more polished style of fusion; here Cobham backed musicians like George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws, and Grover Washington, Jr. Unfortunately, the volatile group chemistry that made Mahavishnu's recordings so exciting also carried over into real life and the original lineup disbanded in 1973.
Deciding to make a go of it on his own, Cobham formed his own band, Spectrum (which initially featured ex-Mahavishnu cohort Jan Hammer on keyboards), and signed with Atlantic. His debut as a leader, also called Spectrum, was released in 1973, showcasing an exciting blend of jazz, funk, and rock that benefited from the presence of guitarists John Scofield and Tommy Bolin (the latter better known for his rock recordings); it also found Cobham experimenting a bit with electronic percussion. Spectrum is still generally acknowledged as the high point of Cobham's solo career, and holds up quite well today. Cobham followed Spectrum with a series of LPs on Atlantic that, like fusion itself, grew increasingly smoother and more commercial as the '70s wore on. For his second album, 1974's Crosswinds, ex-Dreams mate John Abercrombie joined the band, as did keyboardist George Duke, who would become a frequent Cobham collaborator over the years; that same year's performance at Montreux produced the live Shabazz. After Total Eclipse, Cobham moved more explicitly into commercial jazz-funk with 1975's A Funky Thide of Sings, which featured an expanded horn section. He pared the group back down for the improved Life and Times in 1976, and also played Montreux again, in tandem with Duke.
In 1977, Cobham switched to the CBS label, which set him firmly on the path of commercial accessibility. In addition to his records as a leader, he'd remained highly active as a session drummer, and began to focus on that side of his career even more in the late '70s. By 1980, he was done with CBS and began pursuing side opportunities, playing live with the Grateful Dead and Jack Bruce, as well as the Saturday Night Live band. He drummed for the Grateful Dead side project Bobby & the Midnites in 1982, and recorded three albums for Elektra in the early '80s with his new quartet the Glass Menagerie. During the mid-'80s, he cut three commercially oriented LPs for GRP, and spent the next few years stepping up his international touring and absorbing a healthy dose of world music. He played Peter Gabriel's 1992 WOMAD Festival, and the following year recorded The Traveler, inspired by a sojourn in Brazil. In 1996, he formed a more acoustic-oriented quartet called Nordic with three Norwegian musicians; the following year, he also started a German-based fusion outfit called Paradox. In 1998, Cobham began playing with a group called Jazz Is Dead, which devoted itself to jazz reinterpretations of Grateful Dead material; their album Blue Light Rain proved fairly popular among Deadheads. As Cobham maintained his touring, session, and bandleading activities, Rhino released the excellent two-CD retrospective Rudiments: The Billy Cobham Anthology in 2001.
---Steve Huey, All Music Guide |
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