Here's that Billy Cobham transcription— just of a busy portion of Freddie Hubbard's solo on For Someone I Love, on Milt Jackson's record Sunflower. I'm learning a lot about Musescore doing something this damn complicated.
Ignoring form altogether here, the transcription begins at 4:25, a few measures into Hubbard's solo— the first few bars are very light, you can hear where he plays the ruffs/triplets at the beginning of the page— and cutting out after the last big insane lick, out of sheer exhaustion. Tempo is about 74 bpm.
If it looks like a fragmented nightmare, take it up with Mr. Cobham. He packs a lot of stuff into some small spaces. I have some questions about bar 10— the end of yesterday's sixtuplet lick— but I can only let this guy beat me up for so long. It is what it is.
UPDATE: There's a slight fault in the notation in measure 21— each of those drags should be played as a nested triplet. There are supposed to be three dots (...) printed about each of them. Correction coming when I can get to it...
Getting cocky about my Musescore skills now, working on a Billy Cobham transcription, from Milt Jackson's album Sunflower. On the tune For Someone I Love, he does sort of an insane thing that almost crashes the album. The whole thing is really loose anyway.
It happens after 4:45, during the trumpet solo:
The actual transcription isn't complete, but here's a chunk of what he plays there:
It's kind of cursed, I can count through the surrounding four measure phrase, but I can't get the last measure of the lick (not pictured) to resolve to 4/4. I blame Satan.
Anyway, it's essentially an eight note pattern— two paradiddles (or paradiddle inversions, I don't know how he was thinking it) played on the hihat and snare drum, with feet added. Here are some possible inversions of it, in 16ths and triplets:
Probably wise to learn the triplet form with hands only at first. I would want to know where the beginning of the eight note pattern falls, and each paradiddle, and the quarter note pulse— most importantly. Print it out and mark it up. Have fun, make some enemies, transcription coming soon.
People in a band have a tendency to fall into ruts. They hear things only one way. They don't really want to change that much. The guitar player will only play guitar a certain way. It's very hard for that person to hear what I'm hearing.
On some tunes, I might be looking for someone to sound like Eric Gale, and then on another tune, to sound like Van Halen, and then on another piece, to sound like Ritenour.
That's asking a lot of one player. So I try to keep my mouth shut and take what I get from that individual. I try to see if I can't write in such a way as to get the guitar player to think about a certain genre of music to play inside.
- Billy Cobham, Modern Drummer interview by William F. Miller, July, 1986
Here's Flamenco beat played by Billy Cobham on a cover of the Jefferson Airplane song White Rabbit, from George Benson's album of the same name. I've been listening to it on my drives to Eugene and back, the last couple of weeks.
Here's the basic thing he plays, with a lot of variations, when the rhythm section comes in. I don't imagine he had a stock flamenco beat worked up before the recording session. He does add hihat played with the foot on beats 2 and 4.
As it develops he makes a funk beat out of it:
Further on he moves that to the bell of the ride cymbal, generally accenting on the & of the beat, even as the actual rhythm varies:
Billy Cobham playing a swing tune in kind of a show band setting here, on Stanley Turrentine's album The Sugar Man. A lot of it hardly merits a full transcription, except it's good to see how he conducts the band through the sections of the tune, and how and where he goes beyond a straightforward execution of the arrangement. People seem to feel like they have to play this kind of thing very conservatively— which much of this is, but he also plays some stuff.
The tune, More, is a strange item in the universal lounge band repertoire— a lame little annoyance, it's the theme song from the Italian exploitation film Mondo Cane, which is not exactly mainstream fare. It's like if people started playing the theme from Deep Throat in Ramada Inn lounges across the country.
The first page looks pretty dull, there is quite a bit of action later on...
Cobham's cymbal rhythm here is very dotted-8th/16th-y. The skip note is pretty tight against the following beat. He's playing a funny sounding cymbal— maybe a 602 flat ride. Along with his big ol' bass drum his instrument is not the type of sound you hear much any more. He feathers the bass drum and plays soft rim clicks on beats 2 and 4 through much of the early part— I left that out of the transcription.
Listen closely, sometimes he's playing hits with the horns, sometimes he's essentially filling at the end of a phrase, sometimes he plays stuff at the beginning of the phrase, a few times he fills across the barline into the beginning of the next phrase. Often he'll lay down the groove a little heavier at the start of a phrase.
The quintuplet lick in bar 97: what I wrote is close to accurate. I don't know if he's thinking quintuplets or if he's just throwing it in there, but it leads easily with the right hand on each move to the next drum.
Ahhh good times here in the Pacific Northwest, with the forests burning, and the entire city blanketed in smoke so it looks like we're in Blade Runner, or the Mexico sequences from Breaking Bad, with lunatic heavily armed country folk creating their own ad hoc checkpoints to hinder evacuations and catch imaginary antifa arsonists who they believe have swarmed to the countryside to destroy the forests for reasons unknown.
It's good stuff. So I'm just going to post this transcription and leave it. I can't think of anything intelligent to say about it. This is Billy Cobham playing rhythm figures on the head of a swing tune, alternating with an Afro 6 feel. The tune is Introspective, from Stanley Turrentine's album Cherry. I've included a rhythm part outlining the kicks. Maybe it will help in analyzing Cobham's interpretation of them.
Making the transcription I did notice what Wilson Taylor mentioned in the comments on the recent Cobham piece— that Cobham plays very much on the front of the beat. It does sound like it would be challenging to play with him here.
The transcription begins at the start of the track. The meter change is no big deal; he just switches to an Afro 6 groove at the same tempo.
I was working on this post about Billy Cobham some weeks ago, and felt I couldn't finish it— it's not that easy to write a complete portrait of the playing of a great drummer. Try it sometime. But this should be interesting to read in light of my recent thing on Rufus Jones. Take it as a starting place for thinking about what you're hearing when listening to him.
Billy Cobham is one of the most recorded and talked about drummers of the first part of the fusion era— from roughly 1970 to 1980. He was on a lot of records, and made a huge splash playing a large drum set in a really exciting way. He took drumming chops to a new level— maybe not exceeding Buddy Rich, but using more modern drumming language than Buddy. He was involved with a number of technical innovations expanding the concept of the drum set as an instrument. He was the first major player to play the drums “open handed”, that I know of.
He's probably the most effective player of a large drum set ever. Neil Peart, a totally different type of player, would be another example of that. With so many tom toms, he can do some pianistic lines not really possible on normal sets, that I haven't really heard from other large-set players. The modern, fusion era usage of the Chinese cymbal, with the cymbal mounted upside down, is his thing. The way he used it was extremely effective, and was widely copied for a long time. Not so much any more, except among Metal drummers.
There is a specific overall vibe on his records that you don't really hear any more— fusion music shifted to a different kind of product, and the type of music on Cobham's records has never really been revived among younger players— unlike Miles Davis's 70s thing, for example. In terms of drumming, by the 80s Steve Gadd's concept and sound became the prevalent thing in the fusion and studio drumming. When I was a student in that period, Cobham wasn't one of the first people talked about. Drummers today largely talk about him in terms of chops and technique, and he's often mentioned by open-handed drumming enthusiasts. If his playing is talked about at all, it's generally in terms of spectacular drumming feats.
You do have to talk about excitement when you talk about Billy Cobham. He plays with a lot of bravado, and is often wildly dramatic. He can be very flashy and very dense, and it's easy to see how people just take him as pure drumming confection. In a way he's the prototype for the current high-performance drumming thing.
And some of his recordings are like that: parts of them are there to blow away an audience. This is to me a festival-style performance, designed to blow a festival audience's mind:
On most of his records there are extended open drum features, which you can take a number of ways. You could just hear them as early versions of the modern drum chops display events, opportunities to marvel at his technical awesomeness. Or you can take them as examples of 70s bloat and “pretentiousness”— a meme from the 70s rock press— like on Crosswinds there's a solo with a lot of flanger on the tom toms, which sounds corny to us now. I listen to them as music, as creative percussion features:
So it can be difficult to distinguish legit musical energy from just excitement over a spectacular performance, but it's something you have to figure out. Cobham is a great musician and people should understand his playing as normal drumming, doing all the things normal drumming is supposed to accomplish. It may be easier to do that listening to him on records where he's not a leader.
His general approach to playing the drum set could be taken as “snare drummy”— hands-oriented, but modern, not particularly rudimentally based. On fills and solos he seems to play a lot of singles, and a lot of open rolls with accented singles. The bass drum tends to be used in normal funk ways, and for accents, and ostinatos, often tied to the cymbals. We don't often hear a fully integrated linear thing, a la Steve Gadd, or Elvin Jones. In that way maybe he's more similar to Tony Williams than either of those drummers. I think he actually uses his bass drums pretty economically, when he's not doing his showy double bass stuff. In interviews he mentions using his left foot to play time, but I don't feel that I often hear that with him. These are all just my impressions from listening— it's not meant to be the complete last word on his playing.
We don't hear drum sounds like his much any more— it doesn't seem to have been widely copied. It's an energy sound, not a deep “power” sound, which is where things were moving in the 80s. Particularly the tom toms, which are live and tonal, with a sound that is throaty rather than deep/punchy— maybe a combination of Black Dot heads, and moderate tension on the bottom head— as opposed to the loose top/tight bottom for the Gadd-like sound. His snare drum has a very tight, dry sound; it's tuned rather high, with the snares highly tensioned. Clearly his bass drums are large, and somewhat live, but it's a controlled sound, not a huge sound.
This is all set up for listening to him a lot, so please do that. If you're into vinyl, many of these you can find cheaply in used record stores:
As leader:
A Funky Side Of Things
Crosswinds
Alivemutherforya
Total Eclipse
Spectrum
Mahavishnu Orchestra:
Inner Mounting Flame
Birds of Fire
Miroslav Vitous - Purple
George Benson - White Rabbit
Milt Jackson - Sunflower
Miles Davis - Jack Johnson
Stanley Turrentine - Cherry
Deodato - Prelude
Here's a great record from 1970: Purple, led by Miroslav Vitous. With John McLoughlin, Joe Zawinul, and Billy Cobham. It's very much in a post-In A Silent Way Miles mode, with Cobham sounding at times rather Tony Williams-like.
Today we have a funk samba groove from Billy Cobham, playing The Dancer on Stanley Clarke's School Days— one of the biggest fusion albums of the 70s. We're actually throwing a bone to the open-handed players here, because I think Cobham was playing his left hand on the hihat on this. The break in the bass drum pattern on 4 is unusual for a samba feel; the long sound on 4 is also very 70s-fusion to me. This is a very 70s groove.
There are three tom toms here— two medium-pitched drums and a 20" or 22" gong drum. If you don't want to screw with the open-handed thing, just play your right hand on a cymbal. It's not a big deal. The groove develops somewhat during the tune, but the toms are always prioritized. There is a recurring unison on the snare and tom tom on beat 4 of the first measure, which requires a fast move from the hihat to a drum. The quick open hihat on the e of 3 of the second measure is not really a regular part of the groove— you can continue the regular hihat rhythm there if you want.
Here's Billy Cobham playing with Ray Barretto in 1973. The tom toms are just outrageous— really exciting:
You never hear that sound any more— Steve Gadd just wiped everybody else out for fusion tom tom sounds— after him it was all 10 and 12 inch Yamahas with Pinstripes on them. That's still the standard studio pan-pop/funk sound you hear on everything. I guess Cobham is using Black Dots, tuned fairly tight, maybe with the bottoms heads a little looser than the top.
Here he is playing a large Gretsch set in 1974, with what look like Pinstripes on the toms, but they sure don't sound like them. Nice 22" Swish cymbal with ~10 rivets in it, there, too— people used to play loud enough to merit a cymbal like that. There was a really unbridled vibe to 70s music that, for all the skill of current players, we're missing today.
He plays the unaccented notes stronger than is customary today, and puts a light accent on the last note of the triplet; the natural sticking for that is LRL. If you're looking for opportunities to make variations, easy things would be to add a bass drum on the & of 2, or play it along with the hihat on the "&-a's" of 1 and 3.
From early in the track, here's a variation without the 16th note triplet, with an extra open hihat, and a different second beat:
Here's a live version of another fusion classic: Billy Cobham's "Anteres" - The Star, from a record I stole from my brother a long time ago, Alivemutherforya:
That's a rare use of the Tama Octobans you hear there. After the break is the original studio version of the same tune from Billy Cobham's Magic:
I present this just as a curiosity, because I've never encountered this meter anywhere before (maybe in a percussion ensemble piece?). But you can see how we usually deal with the odd #/16 meters; often they will be broken down into a regular meter + some 16ths. The solo section of Frank Zappa's Keep It Greasey, you'll remember, is in 19/16, interpreted as 4/4+3/16. Today's example, Spanish Moss from Billy Cobham's 1974 album Crosswinds, is in 17/16, played as 3/4+5/16 (with the 5/16 further broken down to 2+3/16).
Here's the main groove, plus a couple of more embellished versions that occur frequently throughout the piece:
Larry Appelbaum, writer, blogger, and jazz specialist for the US Library of Congress, among other things, listens to records with Billy Cobham- covering Paul Motian, Lewis Nash, Ndugu, Philly Joe, and more. Here they are discussing one of my favorites of everything to do with it (artist, track, tune, record, drummer, etc), Las Vegas Tango from The Individualism of Gil Evans:
Before: Gil. Nobody writes like that, the chords and the phrasing. [as drums enter] That’s Elvin. What’s really funny about this is that Elvin has a way of playing in 3 while the rest of the band is feeling 2. Gil told me he likes to write and play on the edge of chaos but without falling in. He had this freedom and his using Elvin provides a looseness that could not happen with any other player. So Gil would match the music with the musician. I haven’t mentioned the bass player because the bass player is not listening to what’s going on. The bass player’s in his own world. I can feel that he’s reading what’s on the paper, and it’s correct. Now we have an oboe or English horn player in the mix, which means that everything’s being played very softly. That could be Kenny Burrell. This sounds like early to mid-1960s. You can tell by the quality of the recording that a lot of concessions were made, the technology wasn’t there. And if they did two or three takes of that, it was a lot. These guys know exactly what’s going on, they know how Gil likes to phrase. It’s beautiful.
When you were playing with Gil, what kind of direction would he give the players?
None [chuckles]. What he did was put the music in front of you and then we’d start. Gil didn’t even look at me till after the gig was over. I still have the book, if you want to call it that. It was an inter-office envelope with a few pages of material. On Hotel Me Blues there was a scale and the rest of the chart was blank. That was the drum part. [laughs] Somebody counted off this really slow tempo and the whole idea of this blues was that the whole band had vibrato on every note. This was the funniest stuff I had ever heard. I was almost on the floor laughing, trying to play this. It was like the ultimate challenge to try and fit a square peg into a round hole with this tune and you had to go with it.
After: Gil had a personality you could identify with through his writing; slow, methodical, yet lyrical. He loved to dabble in the world of slowness. He was like a musical sloth; slow moving, deliberate. He could be considered in the category of a Borodin, but for jazz. I can envision lying on my back on the ground and looking up at clouds moving slowly.
YouTube of the track and bonus quote after the break:
Here's a fun clip of Billy Cobham playing Nutville with Horace Silver in 1968. And there's Bennie Maupin on tenor. It's awfully strange seeing Cobham playing a four piece.
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