Billy
Cobham: Still
taking no
prisoners.
One
of the bands
that was
opening for Billy Cobham's Spectrum on
their tour in 2002 was called Acoustic
Jazz is Dead, and the night Cobham's
quartet visited the Conga Room on
Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, the
visiting bunch might have been called
Jazz Fusion is Not Dead.
Cobham, the drummer who many identify
with the Miles Davis "Bitches
Brew" sides or the Mahavishnu
Orchestra of the 1970s, opened his set
that April night with a roaring example
of what he's up to now, which is a lot
like what he was up to in the 1970s,
1980s and 1990s, only bigger and badder,
faster and more furious, and very much
alive.
Cobham's solo work, though, was
judiciously rationed out and not
overabundant. These days, after a long
residency in Europe, Cobham gives his
stuff more light and shadow, more poise,
more musicality. It is not so
damn-the-torpedoes as on the 1973 album
that the tour is supporting,
"Spectrum." Not that he takes
any prisoners with this edition of
Spectrum, as he calls his little band.
The
beard of his lanky bassist
of those 1970s days, Lee Sklar, is thirty
years longer and whiter, and instead of
Jan Hammer on keyboards and Tommy Bolin
on guitar, Cobham's got Gary Husband on
keyboards, and Dean Brown on
guitar.
These two full-maned young men hewed to
the classic Cobham groove, which is not
so much a groove but a lively dance of
death. Husband threw off
spectacular and menacing billows of rich
and scary color, and these were answered
by Brown with cataracts of acid light
that shivered and buzzed in an even more
hair raising and satisfactory fashion.
Supporting or leading them, Sklar and
Cobham understood each other like
brothers in the bond of the baby boomer
bounce, an exaggerated two-beat meter on
which they rested a number of quasi-Latin
claves or rhythmic patterns.
These
varied in numeric designation --
some were
fast, some were slow -- but they
all give the ear pretty much the same
impression of fierce but somehow empty
excitement.
