Obituary for Jimmy Cobb – 48,50 Dollar for a miles steinmit “kind of Blue” drummer Jimmy Cobb world famous. His life was a prototype for a jazz musician of his Generation – in Good times and in Bad.Oliver Hochkeppel0 KommentareEr played to the last: Jimmy Cobb at a concert in Portugal, in 2009.Photo: Keystone
The debate on whether Jazz had once been better, you can take a shortcut with the observation that he was just different. Also because the protagonists were otherwise socialized. Today, the jazz musician is an academician, until the sixties, he was rather self-taught.
The best example of this is the drummer Jimmy Cobb with the almost proto-typical CV of an American jazz musician of his Generation. In 1929, in Washington, in humble circumstances born, learned Cobb High School in Boston drums. “I immediately realized that I want to do. And when I could it well, it was clear to me that I would like to do this for the Rest of my life”, said he later.
His first drum kit he bought as a waiter. At 18, he was “professional”. Cobb began when saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who had played with Duke Ellington and Count Basie. With Earl Bostic, he went in 1951 to his first big American tour. He was ready for higher tasks. About Frank Wess and Leo Parker, he came to Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, and Dizzy Gillespie.
He accompanied Billie Holliday and Sarah Vaughan
in 1958, knocked the Eminence of Jazz: trumpeter Miles Davis, caught up with him in his Band, a year later, he was sitting next to Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers and Bill Evans in the New York CBS Studios and played “kind of Blue”. Cobb is later often been reduced to this milestone, the beginning with the turn to modal Jazz post-BOP, since he was long since the last Live of this legendary sextet.
Unjustly, not only because he stayed up to 1963 Miles Davis in “Sketches Of Spain” was, but with half the Nomenklatura of the Jazz played great trio had, and about other qualities it had. He was also a sensitive accompanist of singers, early on in the case of Billie Holliday, then for Dinah Washington, in the seventies, he was firmly on the side of Sarah Vaughan.
The late stage of life of Billy Cobb shows at the same time, the contempt, the worship, the America the founders very own music culture brings. A social network has been linked to the founding fathers of Jazz never. For his contribution to “kind Of Blue”, with over four million copies up to today’s best-selling jazz album in the world, he has seen his life-time only wage: 48,50 dollars for the three-hour Studio Session.
Like so many earned Cobb the best outside the national borders in Europe. Even if he was appointed in 2009 in the United States to the “NEA Jazz Master”, the highest official award, which is awarded to a jazz musician. The Swiss, at that time, Munich-based saxophonist Roman Schwaller about caught up with him at the end of the nineties on his “Three Generations of Tenor”-tour together with the 1929-born Johnny Griffin, with the Cobb in 1962, had played.
call for donations for medicines
Until a few years ago Cobb was a welcome guest at the major European Festivals, last year his last Album, “This I Dig Of You” was released. Cobb didn’t want to play only until recently (and luckily), he has to do it, for a reasonable retirement an American jazz extends life only rarely.
When he fell ill last year with lung cancer, were used up the reserves quickly. Published in January, Serena Cobb, the older of his two daughters, who had managed until recently, his performances, a call for donations to the medical bills and medications to pay for – also the a fate that many of his Generation share, thinking back with horror to impoverished greats as saxophonists Jimmy Giuffre.
Already in the first days 50’000 dollars a went almost to April, there were 94’000. The appreciation of the jazz community for an exceptional music shows live. Last Sunday, Jimmy Cobb died, as his wife, Eleana told, 91-year-old in New York of cancer.
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