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‘Jazz isn’t about perfection’: drummer Billy Cobham on Miles Davis, Massive Attack and still learning at 80
After a grounding with genre greats, he fused jazz with rock to outrageously funky effect. Ahead of UK dates, he explains why two prosthetic hips aren’t slowing him down
William Cobham Jr is one of history’s greatest drummers, who, alongside Miles Davis and John McLaughlin helped fuse jazz with rock and funk (he co-founded Mahavishnu Orchestra with the latter). Cobham became an influence on everything from Prince to prog, and has also backed icons across a huge spectrum of music – jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins but also James Brown, Roberta Flack, Peter Gabriel and more. Cobham’s broad catalogue has been sampled more than 200 times, thanks to it covering plenty of terrain – from slick jazz funk to yet more diverse collaborations, with the Grateful Dead, Quincy Jones, Chaka Khan, or the son cubano band Asere.
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