Jimmy Cobb, drummer on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, dies aged 91 | Music | The Guardian
by Edward Helmore
Jimmy Cobb, the jazz drummer and last surviving player on Miles Davis’s seminal 1959 album Kind of Blue has died from lung cancer at age 91.
Cobb was key in helping to achieve the cool disposition of a handful of Davis’s masterworks, including 1959’s Porgy and Bess, 1960’s Sketches of Spain, 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come, the 1962 live set Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall and Live at the Black Hawk sessions.
But it was his cymbal work and light pulse on Kind of Blue, the album that cemented Davis’s reputation as the coolest of jazz cats and cited as the best-selling jazz record ever released, for which he will be best remembered.
“Miles would tell us all little things to do and then have us work off his idea,” Cobb told Billboard in 2019.
“He trusted all of us because he knew we were all good musicians. He didn’t really have to do anything else but say what he wanted done.”
