By Tony Ozuna - For the Post
Billy Cobham is one of jazz's greatest drummers and at 67 is still going strong. His Billy Cobham Band, featuring first-rate French and English players, is playing the opening concert for this autumn's Agharta Jazz Festival.
Cobham was brought to New York by his Panamanian parents when he was a small child. He studied music in high school and in the U.S. military from 1965 to '68. Once he was released from the Army, he started playing with some of the greatest jazz players in New York at that time, including the Horace Silver Quintet, as well as Stanley Turrentine and George Benson.
By the early '70s, Cobham was playing with Kenny Burrell, Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, with whom he recorded Bitches Brew, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil and On the Corner. He was also an original member of the jazz-rock fusion group, Mahavishnu Orchestra, led by John McLaughlin. On the funkier side of jazz, he was a founding member of the Head Hunters with Herbie Hancock.
Cobham's first recording as a leader is also a classic. Released on Atlantic Records in 1973, Spectrum is at times too much of an extravaganza of jazz-rock fusion, co-led by a 22-year-old guitarist, Tommy Bolin, a young rocker from Ohio who later joined the James Gang and Deep Purple. At this time, Cobham felt the end was near for his part in John McLaughlin's Mahavishni Orchestra, yet that group's influence is evident in all its exuberance and occasional indulgence on the album.
Cobham's group, which included Jan Hammer on electric piano and synthesizer and Leland Sklar on bass, stumbled upon the holy grail with their recording of "Stratus," a nearly 10-minute epic of futuristic funk-groove, almost buried after an excessive, mid-'70s spacey rock prelude. "Stratus" is a song for the 21st century and became iconic in the '90s, when it was reborn - its bass lines sampled in full by the trip-hop group Massive Attack for their song "Blue Lines" on their 1991 debut.
Around the same time, Cobham recorded more of the funkiest grooves of the '70s with the Brazilian musician-producer Eumir Deodato. Cobham is on Deodato's Prelude, which includes "Also Sprach Zarathustra," a pop-gets-jazzy groove arrangement of Richard Strauss' composition, best known as the "Theme for 2001, A Space Odyssey." Deodato 2 features an unstoppable pop-jazz arrangement of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Cobham devours on all of these Deodato tracks.
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