Fascinating perspectives on the vital role of percussionists like Mister Cobham on The Gears Page forum. Here is an excerpt from comments by FlyingVBlues and a link to the full thread.
I recently read “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation” by Brian Gruber. It was a series of interviews with Billy, Jan Hammmer, Ron Carter, Randy Brecker and others. Billy said that when he was in Mahavishnu “he was just a drummer in the band” and “he was the guy that no one expected anything from”. This set of interviews made me greatly appreciate what a driving force a really dominant drummer could be, and how such a drummer could be the difference between a good band and a great band. As a guitarist I greatly admire and respect Eric Clapton and John McLaughlin, and I love the music of Miles Davis and Parliament/Funkadelic. But I don’t think any of those artists/bands would have been as powerful in either their records or in their live performances without an outstanding drummer.
… And in Mahavishnu when you think about the performances, and not the compositions that McLaughlin wrote, Cobham and sometimes Jan Hammer were way more important to the sound of that band then McLaughlin was. If you listen carefully to John McLaughlin he has a problem keeping time. He has a tendency to speed up the tempo, and Cobham deftly anchors his playing to keep the time where it should be. Billy can play in a groove that sets and maintains the rhythm and tempo of the piece, which is something that McLaughlin doesn’t so well. And listen to Cobham’s playing on the “Jack Johnson” album. Billy Cobham brought a funkier approach to Miles’ recordings, and the groove on “Right Off” and also “Corrado” on “Bitches Brew” are among the strongest Miles Davis ever recorded.
The International Policy Digest published my article on the January 6 insurrection attempt at the United States Capitol, along with a solid dollop of promotion of the “Surmountable” book. Here is an excerpt with a link to the full article.
How Americans Surrendered the Mantle of Artful Peaceful Protest
FEBRUARY 27, 2021
We Americans, a hubristic lot, imagine we are exceptional at most everything. Even our name is a conceit, one nation in the Americas, and nah, we are the real Americans.
There is certainly a huge dallop of delusion in the notion of America as a beacon of human rights, civil liberties, peace and freedom, leaders of the free world, standard-bearers of democracy, guardians of the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Still, as I travel the world, I am continually impressed by the deep and abiding admiration this country commands, large, radioactive warts notwithstanding. Especially the two-fifths of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantee that Congress shall make no law abridging the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Peaceably.
On the 6th of January – already that date bursts with meaning and imagery – the utter failure of Americans to grasp its own traditions came home to roost. “Patriots” violently intruded on the lynchpins of constitutional freedoms. The five dozen court rulings, the validated elections of the 50 states, the establishment by state and federal election officials that there was no evidence of fraud, were all repudiated and scorned in an orchestrated attack on the Congress, with murderous intent, cheered on by the President of the United States.
These conservative standard-bearers, who never saw a protest they didn’t disdain – Black Lives Matters, women’s rights, climate change – bastardized the notion of protest into, “We take what’s ours.” Ours being predominantly white, male, and Christianist.
I recently traveled around the United States – and four continents – to visit activists and thought leaders who witnessed or analyzed 13 iconic political protests, from Selma, Standing Rock, Occupy, and the Bonus Army, to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Ukraine’s Euromaidan, and South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution. What struck me repeatedly was the fresh, passionate convictions of overseas protesters, religiously nonviolent, and vividly aware of the U.S. tradition of people’s governance, as a contrast to the declining understanding at home of the need to protect and nurture our political traditions. Our history of native genocide, slavery, and endless military misadventures aside, they struck me as more appreciative of American civil society than Americans.
In the printed chronicle of that trip, Surmountable, co-written with Adam Monier Edwards, we document a litany of absurd gaps in citizen education.
I had the pleasure to coach Wendy May through her process of writing and publishing her book Regenerative Purpose. She also conducted a highly successful Kickstarter campaign to support key aspects of her product launch. I was privileged to write the book’s Foreword.
Wendy recently announced the launch of her audio book. You can purchase the audiobook – and all other versions – here.
She is also leading a workshop that may interest you. This from an email she sent out today:
2020 has certainly tested us… with physical, emotional, financial and egoic death. We’ve had to meet our limits and transcend them. We have been permanently changed.
Are you clear now on what’s next? How do you want to shape 2021?
For me, so many questions have arisen about…
MY PLACE IN THE WORLD What is the nature of life and death? What makes a human life worth living? How do I speak my truth when the word “truth” itself triggers confusion?
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH SELF How do I measure my value in the world when I’m not actively working? What does it feel to take up space when I’m not confident in my direction?
MY LIFE LESSONS TO LEARN Can I love and give fully and fearlessly, without knowing who will receive it? Can I boldly walk to the edge of my discomfort and expand from there?
AND, HOW TO KEEP GOING Can I step forward into what’s next without being able to see the whole path? What is it to be a leader in the new planetary paradigm? Am I ready for that?
SO MANY QUESTIONS
Maybe you have been considering some of the same questions.
I don’t know any of the answers.
But I do know that when we come together to ask these kinds of questions, magic always happens. I’m inviting a small group of devoted souls to join me in kicking off 2021 with Regenerative Purpose Co-Lab.
Announcing… REGENERATIVE PURPOSE CO-LAB
It’s an 11-week journey to support the living integration of Regenerative Purpose.
It’s not coaching. It’s not an online course. It is a group r/evolution co-creation lab.
It’s limited to 6 people, to make sure there’s spaciousness for sharing and reflections.
The purpose of the Co-Lab experience is to come together in community and find clarity, while releasing the need for control. We are pointing each other towards that sweet spot of creative contribution that is active (not pushy) and receptive (not passive).
This work helps us get clear on what we want in life, how we want to live and serve, and what choices we’re willing to make to realize that reality. Yet we can relax the normal management and control functions that create stress around striving. We learn the art of reading and responding to life, so we can shape our path with ease.
For experienced coaches and facilitators, there is also the possibility to get trained and licensed to lead Regenerative Purpose Co-Lab circles yourself.
Before embarking on the Surmountable book project, I interviewed 25 community leaders, business owners, long-time residents, characters, and storytellers, both Thai and expat. With Surmountable about to launch, I have resumed the Koh Phangan interviews.
The short-term intention is to get an oral history ebook up by mid-year 2021. And, then, a longer-form work for print and ebook by year-end. These things take the time they need to take, so those are tentative, though achievable timeframes.
My first visit to the island was 10 years ago. I moved here full-time five years back. I hope to relate the magic dimensions of Phangan life. There are many stories to tell.
Due to publishing and publicity timeline adjustments, the Surmountable book launch date has been adjusted to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday on January 18 and President’s Day on February 15. Pre-order on Amazon and other online book retailers will be available in early January.
Stay tuned for more details on the launch and early reviews.
We keep batting 1,000 on Six Days book reviews. This one from Geoff Wills of the esteemed Penniless Press.
SIX DAYS AT RONNIE SCOTT’S: BILLY COBHAM ON JAZZ FUSION AND THE ACT OF CREATION
by Brian Gruber
Reviewed by Geoff Wills
Billy Cobham is one of the all-time great drummers. Although he emerged in the mid-1960s playing in a straight-ahead jazz context with artists like Billy Taylor and Horace Silver, he began to make his mark in the field of jazz-rock from the late 1960s onwards with the band Dreams, on recordings by Miles Davis, and, specifically between 1971 and 1973, with British guitarist John McLaughlin’s seminal jazz-rock group Mahavishnu Orchestra. Fellow musicians were flabbergasted by his phenomenal technique and a unique style that utilized military precision, ambidexterity, jazz subtlety, rock and roll excitement, rhythm and blues feel and an ability to play odd time signatures, all on a very large two-bass drum percussion setup. Although Cobham has been interviewed for magazines many times over the years, Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s is the first book specifically devoted to his life and work.
The book’s author, Brian Gruber, is a prominent media marketing innovator and longstanding jazz and popular music aficionado, now based in Thailand. He first met Billy Cobham in 2010, and, as he explains, his book is not a biography but ‘an oral history exploring six decades of music.’
The background to the book is a six-day residency in June 2017 at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, which Billy Cobham undertook with a 17-piece big band led by trumpeter and arranger Guy Barker, playing orchestrations of Cobham compositions. Gruber was at the club during the entire residency, interviewing not only Cobham but also band musicians, club officials, friends and family members. The book thus provides a kaleidoscopic view, a tapestry of interview material, covering Cobham’s life and work, and also the progress of an extended engagement by a world-class musician and orchestra in an internationally-renowned club as described by club owners, road managers, music critics and fans.
Cobham who was born in Panama in 1944, came to New York with his family three years later, growing up in Brooklyn in a community that included Barbadians, Trinidadians and Panamanians. His father, a statistician, was also a talented pianist and was an early influence. The house was full of music from AM radio, relaying the sounds of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Harry James, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. As a result of these influences Cobham began to play percussion while still a toddler, accompanied his father aged eight, and at sixteen got his first complete drum set when he went to the High School of Music and Art. After a spell in the army, playing in a military band, his professional career began.
Gruber is able to draw from Cobham insights into the darker side of the music business. For instance, Cobham describes how, in the mid-1970s, in a band he co-led with keyboard player George Duke, ‘I knew that I was working with a bunch of thugs.’ He is referring to Duke’s manager, ‘dominant, management by intimidation. [Frank] Zappa band manager Herb Cohen … you had a goon as management, some kind of gangster.’
In another anecdote, Cobham relates how, after being with Mahavishnu Orchestra for a few years, he noticed that another drummer, Narada Michael Walden, started to sit behind him at concerts. Soon after, he was told by management that he was no longer in the band. He believes that this was because he was not prepared to follow John McLaughlin’s religious direction. Thus, Cobham’s views of McLaughlin are not totally positive. ‘The only complimentary thing that John McLaughlin gave me was a picture of John Coltrane for Christmas … McLaughlin had no sense of time, always getting faster. Reach God as quickly as possible.’ The final straw with McLaughlin was in 1984 when, after having recorded an album with him, Cobham learned from an outside source that another drummer was in the band for the tour to promote the album.
Overall, though, Cobham’s career has been hugely successful. After leading his own groups he moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s and freelanced in Europe. As described by Gruber, the residency at Ronnie Scott’s epitomizes this success, made clear in interviews with band members like Steve Hamilton, Carl Orr, Mike Mondesir and Guy Barker. Phone interviews with eminent musicians and collaborators Randy Brecker, Jan Hammer and Ron Carter add further clarification.
Gruber adds tangential interest to his book by providing a history of Ronnie Scott’s club which includes an illuminating interview with club co-owner Michael Watt. Other fascinating sidebars pop up throughout the book.
Billy Cobham emerges from these pages as an exemplary creative personality, and as a dedicated, tireless and likeable professional. The book is highly recommended to anyone who has a serious interest in jazz-rock, the life of the musician, and popular music culture of the last fifty years.
Mark Phinney’s epic weeklong Koh Phangan Man event, the second in a series, concluded this week. One of the joys of living on the island is the presence of numerous artists, entrepreneurs, and idealists innovating new modes of living, entertaining, and transforming.
With the talented Gabrielle Leon providing the background tunes, Liz Griffin and I performed the entire 3,000 word poem Howl as part of a playful sunset poetry happening we organized, “Filthy Sunset.” I also read Love’s Victim from Ovid’s “Amores.”
Earlier this year, I visited City Lights Bookstore, the scene of the legal battle to publish Howl six decades ago, and talked to the store’s manager Elaine Katzenberger about that unique fight for First Amendment free speech protections. Here are excerpts from that interview, parts of which will be used in my upcoming book on the art and alchemy of successful political protests.
There is a museum at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborh0od dedicated to the beats. It’s worth visiting but for my money the sacred epicenter of the social movements that shook the youth of a nation for decades is across at the street at City Lights bookstore. Any bookstore is magic, the holder of promised secrets and a slice of the grand history of human knowledge. City Lights, with its mythic origins and tumultuous past is one of a tiny subset of literary shops that holds something more, something sacred. I walk in and a mother stands at a respectful distance while her pre-teen boy engages the cashier in a line of questioning. Do you have this book, where can I find books on that subject, mom knowing some of the answers but choosing to allow the experience of discovery.
I met the manager of City Lights bookstore (and publishing house) some years back when I video recorded and livestreamed some of their author events for FORA.tv. Elaine Katzenberger is, as you might imagine, a thoughtful and interesting woman, two attributes required to choreograph the visitor experience and keep it relevant as one of America’s important bookstores. On this weekday morning, the place was packed buzzing with visitors, the out-of-town tourists, the loyal locals, and no doubt one or two devotees of the faith, the never-ending pursuit of that one new book that will crack open the universe in some new way.
Gruber: Why is City Lights such a quintessential part of San Francisco’s civic life?
Katzenberger: Well, I don’t really think of it as belonging to San Francisco because people who don’t live here come for the same reasons that you do and that I was originally drawn here. San Francisco was the place Lawrence birthed City Lights, but it has transcended that, it’s more of a world location and it holds something that people need. It also may sound a bit abstract or metaphysically corny…
Gruber: Keep it coming.
Katzenberger: It has to do with ideals, feelings of integrity; there are a lot of interpretations that have been layered over the founding stories. Some visitors are just tourists, and some are clearly making a pilgrimage, but everybody is looking for the same thing on some level.
Gruber: And what is that?
Katzenberger: People would use different words – it’s a large stew – but it’s that creativity trumps capitalism, and that the human spirit is somehow communicating with other human spirits in this way that is authentic, and not subject to the rules that the rest of the economy is playing by. Maybe that’s why San Franciscans who have lived here a long time want to claim it, because the city used to talk about itself that way, it was an illusion, but a lot of people came to San Francisco for the same reason that people come now to City Lights.
Gruber: Lawrence is about to have a big (100th) birthday. Can you articulate what was the ethos at that time, the ethos of the beats that motivated Lawrence to publish Howlin 1956? What was happening then, particularly in the context of how that might be relevant now?
Katzenberger: Lawrence always talks about how, first and foremost, he wanted to publish it because he identified it as groundbreaking poetry, he thought that Ginsberg was doing something that no one had done, and that had to do with poetics as (much as) anything else. And then, in terms of the content, the way in which the poem decries capitalism and militarism, that is what the counterculture in the 1960s was trying to talk about, rebellion against conformism, against the celebration of what capitalism was supposed to bring to quote, unquote average Americans. It meant reaching for freedom outside of that, somehow captured in this poem, which was especially exciting to him (Ferlinghetti). It was also the shared declamatory nature of it, very much talking about making poetry some form of actual communication, and that was part of what the beats were about, poetry as speech, poetry as a way of actually getting the message across.
Gruber: A key focus for the store is books on progressive politics. What does it mean to be progressive?
Katzenberger: Another big question. Something to do with putting the social contract with other human beings and other life forms on the planet before profit and power.
Gruber: One of the premises of the ’56 trial was that Ginsberg and, by extension, Ferlinghetti, were subversive. Do you think that the acts of protests of Ferlinghetti and the beat poets and the kind of literary explorations that City Lights does are patriotic, are aligned with what the founders had in mind in terms of how citizens need to be engaged politically?
Katzenberger: Obviously. If you want to be able to participate in a democracy, you need to be able to not only be informed, but to form opinions based on critical thinking, all of those things are part of civic life and a healthy democracy.
Gruber: When a visitor walks out of your store, what do you hope they leave with, in addition to a large handful of books? What’s the experience?
Katzenberger: I hope they feel validated in being part of a community of interesting, thoughtful, sensitive human beings. That’s what books have always given me. That’s what I hope that books give other people too.
GRUBER: It fascinates me that Bill at 73 is not only touring a lot but almost every year producing new music. What is it for men like you and Bill that motivates you to continue to create and innovate when you can simply play other people’s music or rely on things you might have done years ago?
BRECKER: It’s a good question and I don’t know if I can put myself on a level of Billy’s output, which is really just incredible, but I think it has to do with, after you do something, it gets old pretty quickly. So, we are always trying, we just want to play something new, we can’t rest on our laurels too long. Plus, this is what we do. We don’t have many outside interests. You find that with a lot of great artists. I’m very close for instance with Paul Simon, and a tour manager that works with Paul and Bob Dylan. I asked him the same question, how come most guys are still killing themselves on tour? Not everybody has to do it. He said, “Look man, they don’t know what else to do with themselves.” Other than play, write music and tour, I don’t have a lot of outside interests. Of course my famIly, I want to be home sometime, but that’s what motivates us I think. We love to play. And for my money, I think Bill is, I swear to God, playing better than ever. I heard him in Brazil, maybe two, three years ago with Jeff Berlin and Scott Henderson, it was a trio and man, he just played better than ever. Everything is just settled now. It’s incredible.
GRUBER: When you watch him in YouTube videos from the ’70’s and ’80’s, to now, he really does have quite a physical presence.
BRECKER: And let me say one other thing. In the ensuing years, I wouldn’t play with him regularly, more like a special guest thing. But every time I did, I noticed he always brought something new to the table. Not only new music, the way he played, it always fascinated me. Some kind of new drum that he invented or something I never heard before. That alone, throughout the years, is quite an accomplishment.
GRUBER: Do you have some favorite memories on or off-stage?
BRECKER: There are a lot of them. How do I narrow it down? I was just always completely knocked out playing with him. (Laughs.) I probably shouldn’t say this. I remember he was so confident of his playing – as he should have been because I think he was the greatest drummer and still is – but when drum machines first came out, he tried to overdub the drum machine over his track. That didn’t work too well. I remember the look on his face.
GRUBER: Where do you think he fits in the history of percussion? How would you sum up his cumulative contribution to the music world?
BRECKER: He always would mention Tony Williams and Jack. After that period it was just Billy as far as I am concerned. The guy who originated the whole thing was Bill. The fact that he has been playing so long and is still this great, places him at the forefront of jazz drumming, of composition. He has had the same kind of influence on drummers that Jaco had on bass players.
Brian Gruber is an author, writing coach, and marketing consultant living on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. He has spent 40 years studying, leading, and founding new media companies and projects.
