“Six Days” book review on the UK’s number three-rated jazz blog, bebop spoken here:

This is one of those books that you can’t put down although, initially I thought I’d struggle to get beyond the first page, not being a big fan of fusion and it’s practitioners.

That was then! Now, after devouring every word like someone coming off a hunger strike, I find myself listening to Bitches Brew and, if I had any any Mahavishnu albums I’d be listening to them too! Whilst I’d hardly describe myself as a convert, such is the impact of the writing, both by Gruber and Cobham, that you are drawn into the music without even hearing it!

Set over six nights at Ronnie Scott’s it describes not only Cobham’s playing behind Guy Barker’s hand picked British big band (Paul Booth is in the line-up) but also includes the before and after (fly on the wall) conversations with a lot of memories along the way.

Intriguing is the meticulous attention Cobham pays to his kit. Three missing floor tom-tom legs almost became a world (jazz) crisis. Every drummer in the universe should study Cobham’s tuning of his drums. He pitches them as carefully as any horn or string player so that he is in accord with what is going on around him.

But, apart from the description of the gig which sold-out 6 nights running, there are also his memories of the many previous highlights in his illustrious career. There was his time in the army where, by a fortuitous posting, he was able to spend time at home and do some moonlighting jazz club gigs in the evening. His big time breakthrough with Horace Silver which brought him fame if not fortune leading to the ensuing super stardom with Miles, the Breckers, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and his present status where he has annually pulled full houses at Ronnie’s for 11 consecutive years.

Needless to say, author Gruber extracts opinions from him on the various musicians he has worked with. He speaks frankly and honestly. His opinions, although never malicious, come across as genuine and observant.

To sum up, it’s one helluva book. I didn’t need to be at Ronnie’s for those 6 nights – I’ve just been there! Every unheard note and drum beat is ingrained inside me.

Bandleader Guy Barker with David and Hildegard Shah backstage at Ronnie Scott’s

All reviews for “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation” on Amazon’s global sites have received 5 out of 5 stars. Here is Billy Cobham’s closest friend David Shah with his take.

September 27, 2018    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A snapshot of some of the recent reviews that have come in for “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s.” Thanks to all the reviewers for their generous and detailed look at the work. 

What They Are Saying About “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s”

“The book is a massive undertaking… Despite being raised a generation and culture apart from Bed-Sty raised Panamanian born William Emanuel Cobham, Jr., Gruber manages to pull off a remarkable feat of music journalism… The interviews with Cobham cover a galaxy of subjects; from the cruel realities of the New York public school system, to the rhythmic complexity of a woman sashaying when walking or the sonic intricacies of live performance…There is so much information in this book that any serious student of Jazz, Fusion or music history will reap a bountiful harvest…A nice touch is the Spotify Soundtrack for each chapter of the book that contains some very unexpected musical gems. Hats off to Brian Gruber who accomplished what few could have written with such elaborate authority.” – TWatts, Cadence Jazz Magazin

From Jon Newey, editor-in-chief of Jazzwise,the UK’s biggest selling monthly jazz magazine and the leading English language jazz magazine in Europe. “An interesting concept… his questions are knowledgeable and penetrating… rather than dallying in the kind of film-flam that obfuscates the detail, memories and opinions that make a biography breathe… Fast paced with anecdotes pouring from every page, it wraps with Cobham describing his dream line-up to play with. Want to know who? Then go grab a copy.”

From London’s Jazz FM,the UK’s “home of jazz, soul and blues” on Nigel Williams’ Saturday show, August 25th, Jazz FM’s highest rated weekly program. “The mark of a good read is something that conjures up pictures and just in that description, you’re already putting yourself backstage and seeing these conversations happen… an absolutely fascinating read. Any fan is obviously going to enjoy this.”

From Brent Keefe, Drumheadmagazine.“Remarkably, Brian Gruber’s book is the first written on this legendary musician and although not a biography, it’s certainly biographical, overlaying six days at Ronnie Scott’s with six decades of Billy’s remarkable life and career… It’s a fascinating read… Cobham opens up and discusses several topics that I have not previously seen him discuss. It’s a terrific insight into the musical and personal life of this game-changing, world class drummer and is an essential read for fans of Cobham, Jazz, fusion and the culture of the 60s and 70s.”

From Geoff Nicholls, Rhythm magazine.Five stars (highest rating). “Well-written and thought-provoking, Gruber’s book builds into a challenging document of a half-century of cutting-edge musical exploration.”

From Eric “Doc” Smith, BeyondChron.“Brian Gruber’s fantastic new book… gives us a rare, behind the scenes look at the making of a six night performance… Gruber virtually puts the reader in the cafe, the nightclub, or in the car alongside him and Cobham. There are so many fantastic stories and so much musical history… Brian Gruber’s Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation, will certainly stand the test of time alongside some of the greatest tomes ever penned about jazz musicians.”

Here is my interview on London’s Jazz FM, the UK’s “home of jazz, soul and blues” on Nigel Williams’ Saturday show, August 25th, considered, I’m told, Jazz FM’s highest rated weekly program. Go to their website till this Saturday to hear it (I’ll get a copy to post after that) or read the interview below.
https://www.jazzfm.com/player/od/items/1016/

NIGEL WILLIAMS: So lovely, Aretha Franklin, “It Only Happens.” Now for drumming fans, get ready for a conversation for a new book about Billy Cobham coming up in just a minute. First let’s take a classic moment from him in, “Red Baron.”

“Red Baron” by Billy Cobham at 23:40. Interview commences at 29:00.

NIGEL WILLIAMS: My first guest is the author of “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation.” His name is Brian Gruber, who is actually in Thailand at the moment. Brian, whereabouts are you?

GRUBER: I’m on a beach on the north part of Koh Phangan, Thailand and the sun is going to go down shortly and it’s a beautiful day and you should be here.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think we should be, yes, we are all very, very jealous now. Let’s come back to London Soho then, and focus on Ronnie Scott’s. Your book is called “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s.” The obvious question is, what’s it all about?

BRIAN GRUBER: I’ve known Bill Cobham for a while. The longer I knew him and thought I knew all of his stories, every time we would be driving somewhere or backstage at a show, he would have more and more new stories. What do you mean you were in a play with Muhammed Ali? And, what do you mean you jammed in a dance band with Jimi Hendrix at the New York Armory? And finally, I said, you’ve got to get these stories down. You owe it to yourself and to your fans. When he told me he was doing this six day gig with the UK’s fabulous Guy Barker arranging his best songs, with a really top-shelf 17-piece big band, I thought, what an interesting opportunity to go backstage, go to all the rehearsals, the load-in, the sound check, see the chatter between the musicians, how they set up their gear, and overlay six days backstage at this iconic club with six decades of a legend’s musical life. I think that technique worked and what came out of it is a book that a lot of people are enjoying.

WILLIAMS: I think that the mark of a good read is something that conjures up pictures and just in that description, you’re already putting yourself backstage and seeing these conversations happen.

GRUBER: Yeah, and to me, I don’t know whether it’s a fetish, I love being in a club hours before, during a sound check, seeing how these masters test how the acoustics are in different parts of the room, listening to them decide what’s on the playlist, to me, that’s, to use an American term, the “inside baseball.” What I tried to do, in addition to telling Bill’s best stories, was to give a sense of what that experience is like, especially at an extraordinary place like Ronnie Scott’s.

WILLIAMS: How does he, Billy Cobham himself, see this? Because quite often, with these really great artists, you speak to them and effectively, they are not thinking about it, they are just being themselves. Or, others, it really does go to their head. Which is he?

GRUBER: I was sitting with Michael Watt, one of the owners of Ronnie’s, and Bill was onstage, joking and being self-deprecating and Michael turned to me and said, “He shouldn’t do that. He’s a legend.” Bill has fierce pride about his music but is also very humble about it.

The deal we had is, it’s my book, I’ll have creative control but everything that I write you will be able to see before it’s published, and if there is anything too intimate or personal or wrong, then we’ll change that. And there were a lot of things about his family, about race, about his relationship with John McLaughlin, that were very personal. Finally, I persuaded him, that in order to tell your story, it’s your call, but we should keep these things in the book, and we did. So, I think for Bill, 74 years old now, he has never had a full-length book, a work like this, written about him, and I think there was a level of trust based on our relationship over the years. I had full access, I interviewed his wife and his brother, so many people, and ultimately I think he trusted me and I had a passion to tell his story.

WILLIAMS: It sounds like an absolutely fascinating read. Any fan is obviously going to enjoy this. Brian, we will be looking forward to seeing you when you come back to the UK, and do another one of these. Any other artists in mind that you would like to do a similar treatment to?

GRUBER: No, but I’ll tell you, it was so much fun for me. I had dinner with Bill and Kenny Barron and Ron Carter in Phoenix a few weeks ago. It’s a great privilege to hear and tell the story of a musical legend, or a political or business legend for that matter. Loved doing it and would love doing it again.

WILLIAMS: Brian, thanks very much indeed. Let’s play some Billy Cobham now, here with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, back from 1971, the legendary “You Know, You Know.”

Post-song:

WILLIAMS: Now how about that for some drumming then. With the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham there with “You Know, You Know,” much sampled that track, the album is, The Inner Mounting Flame from 1971. If you are interested in the book, it’s called, “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation.”

DownBeat, the “granddaddy of music magazines” has just asked to do a review of the book. Jazz FM, London’s premiere jazz radio station interviewed me for a feature on their highest rated show, airing Saturday, August 25.

There is a new, superb review from the UK’s top jazz magazine Jazzwise.

And this from Eric “Doc” Smith.

“Brian Gruber’s fantastic new book… has captured Cobham’s anecdotes, insights, and humor like no one before him… Gruber gives us a rare, behind the scenes look at the making of a six night performance… Gruber virtually puts the reader in the cafe, the nightclub, or in the car alongside him and Cobham. There are so many fantastic stories and so much musical history…

“Brian Gruber’s “Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation”, will certainly stand the test of time alongside some of the greatest tomes ever penned about jazz musicians.”

READ THE FULL REVIEW here.

Another story about Bill’s Crosswinds tour by By Rob Nagy, and another discussion of the new book.

“Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s” covers six decades of Cobham’s musical life, from his early days playing with Miles Davis on “Bitches Brew” to the formation of Mahavishnu Orchestra to performances with virtually every jazz great to his still-prolific schedule of touring and recording at age 73. Masters such as Ron Carter, Randy Brecker, Jan Hammer, and Guy Barker, as well as club owners, jazz critics and fans all get in on the action as the transformative early years of jazz fusion are explored, along with what drives Cobham to continue to create. Details of the full print and eBook release will be made public shortly.

“There are flashes of things that happened in my career,” says Cobham. “The things that you go through in life that make you say, ‘Wow I never thought about it like that, until it happens.’ When you put it down on paper it takes on a life of its own. A really great friend named Brian Gruber sat down with me. We used to chuckle about a lot of the funny quirky things that used to happen, over time he said, ‘We should do this.’

Sure enough we did it, the book is here and it’s really interesting.”

“It was fascinating for me to explore what happens with an artist that has that strong impulse to create and Bill’s personal story as to how he has stayed the course all these decades as an innovator and pioneer,” adds the book’s author, Brian Gruber. All the jazz legends that I spoke to said, ‘Billy is one of the greats.’ A very unusual combination of someone who can do it all, not just do one thing great, but from jazz to rock to funk and integrating it all.”

“Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation”

PREFACE  

There was a domestic war in the United States, a growing ‘generation gap’ in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s even as the conflict in Vietnam was escalating. I was 14 in March of 1970, my brother Jeff a wise but wild role model at the advanced age of 19.

My earliest memory is of my mother Claire tying my shoes at three years old at our Legion Street, Brooklyn tenement. But my fiercest early memory was Mom raging at Jeff in our East New York, Brooklyn housing-project apartment upon finding anti-war paraphernalia. Five decades later, I can tell you exactly what one button said: “The Great Society, Bombs, Bullets, Bullshit.”

It was a political and cultural divide and music was smack on the front lines. Jazz, firmly established as America’s popular music, had been overwhelmed by rock and roll, which my parents despised. Anti-war buttons aside, and well before music might be safely sequestered in iTunes libraries, vinyl ‘records’ littered teenage bedroom floors, with designs, liner notes and musical forms aspiring to subvert the existing order. Relatively clueless, as I trailed my brother’s political and musical evolution by a half decade, I could tell the degree of subversion by the pitch of my mother’s voice.

“The Sad Sad World of Mothers and Fathers??!?” That Brute Force title was not well received by Claire, nor were Frank Zappa lyrics, or odd, loud explosions of sound taunting my parents’ more civilized record collection, tucked neatly in the hi-fi stereo cabinet.

Billy Eckstine was a favorite of Mom’s. As was Frank Sinatra. There was Cab Calloway, who my father hired in the ‘30s to perform at his Brooklyn house party. And lots of Al Jolson, who Dad could imitate flawlessly. Some of the records did find some purchase amongst the kids. Dave Brubeck’s odd-metered Take Five. And the first jazz album that turned my head, the breakthrough bossa nova classic, Getz/Gilberto.

In March 1970, President Richard Nixon was promising peace with honor in Vietnam while striking out at the Paris peace talks. But my dad Sol and brother Jeff found their own way to harmonize personal and musical differences: they took me to my first concert. The Fillmore East was Bill Graham’s Manhattan rock and roll mecca, and a unique breeding ground for visual and musical experimentation. The headliner, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, was preceded by the Steve Miller Blues Band. With Miles Davis opening, and performing, among other things, the breakthrough release that is widely considered the birth of jazz-rock ‘fusion,’ Bitches Brew.

No, that’s not quite right. Davis played second.

I was opening for this sorry-ass cat named Steve Miller…didn’t have shit going for him, so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So, I would come late and he would have to go on first, and then when we go there, we just smoked the motherfucking place and everybody dug it, including Bill. – Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1989, pg. 301

A few weeks before, William Emmanuel Cobham Junior found himself in a studio recording tracks for Bitches Brew, along with John McLaughlin and an astounding cast of artists who would go on to transform jazz and popular music.

I first met Billy Cobham just before my birthday in August of 2010. I was spending a good part of the summer at friend Marynell Maloney’s home in France’s Loire River valley. A few days earlier, just across the river in Jargeau, Joan of Arc’s old stomping grounds, I was reading in an open-air plaza, sipping a glass of local wine, when three musicians suddenly set up a few yards away. They proceeded to perform an acoustic rendition of Chick Corea’s Spain. After their shockingly good performance, I introduced myself and got their card. Marynell invited them to perform at the birthday party and I casually suggested Bill might join them. She rightly scorned the idea, a legend playing with local musicians, won’t happen. But after dinner, as they played on the patio under a starry sky, he did just that on a tiny drum set. A friend of Bill’s remarked, “He can’t help himself.”

In the years since, I have seen Bill perform in Paris, Milan, Rio and numerous U.S. cities. As he plugged his iPad into my car audio system, he would share a never-ending stream of stories that were not only insightful, bawdy and astounding, but also provided a unique panorama of the last half-century of American music. So, when Bill told me he was collaborating with Britain’s hottest arranger, jazz trumpeter Guy Barker, to orchestrate and perform his oeuvre with a 17-piece big band at Europe’s premiere jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, I thought: why not hang out backstage, in rehearsals and at the bar during the six-day run and finally gather those stories. Not a biography, but an oral history exploring six decades of music, an improvised series of encounters during one special week. Talk to the greats who have played with him, club owners, music critics, friends and family to explore the source of Billy Cobham’s musical power and joy, this jazz fusion pioneer and innovator, and discover what motivates him to continue to create at the age of 73.

Guy is calling the six-day residency at Ronnie’s “a celebration of Bill’s life and work in music.” Billy Cobham, a guy voted year after year as the greatest drummer in the world, considered the greatest living jazz fusion drummer, one-time bandmate of Miles Davis, Randy Brecker, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, Ron Carter, George Duke, Stan Getz, Muhammad Ali (!), George Benson, Freddie Hubbard, Billy Taylor, Horace Silver, from incarnations of the Grateful Dead and Jack Bruce to Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD, the list seems endless.

Back in the chateau’s expansive dining room, I asked Bill if he had any birthday advice for me. He answered without hesitation, “Live your life with reckless abandon.”

I’m working on it.

Brian Gruber

December 18, 2017

Koh Phangan, Thailand

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