DETAILS

Jimmy Cobb's Kind of Blue
Jack Singer Concert Hall
Wednesday, June 24 - Wednesday, June 24

More in: Blues / Jazz

It’s been 50 years since jazz giant Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue. Justifiably, the most popular jazz recording in history still enjoys a huge reputation and the last surviving member of the recording band is touring in tribute to the album. Drummer Jimmy Cobb, who played in that legendary session, brings his all-star lineup to the Jack Singer Concert Hall on Wednesday, June 24.

Kind of Blue was groundbreaking, establishing such seminal pieces as Davis’s “So What,” and it’s no small task to revisit those tunes. Cobb wants to re-create that energy from that 1959 session, though, and so far, he’s doing just that. “We’re going to do the album like it was,” Cobb says. “We’re going to play the tunes like they were, and then if we have to play longer, then we’re going to do some more Miles Davis tunes. So far it’s been working out pretty good. Everybody’s loving it.”

It isn’t just the music that was so special in that 1959 session. There was something unique between Davis, Cobb, John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers. “The energy was good, and the energy was always good with those guys,” Cobb recalls. “That day was a little sombre because they were concentrating on what they had to do, you know. It’s usually always joyful. The guys were good with each other, so everybody was OK, everybody was feeling each other. Well, the band was sort of like family anyway. Everybody felt for each other.”

That same sense of family is also part of the tribute band, Cobb says. “I get that feeling because of the guys I got there, they know what it is and they can produce it. It gives me a good feeling about it. The trumpet player, Wallace Roney, he’s a really great trumpet player… he would’ve been Miles’s choice. That makes it for real for me; all those guys, it makes it really for real.”

The tribute band’s roster also includes Vincent Herring on alto, Javon Jackson on tenor, Larry Willis on piano and Buster Williams on bass — a lineup that has the same magic as the 1959 originals. As Cobb says of the Kind of Blue session, “You have to be able to be producin’ it. It’s not so hard, sometimes, when you produce it with guys that you’ve played with; it’s just a thing that’s natural. When you play with other people, you have to produce it. You have to acquire that. Most musicians, at one time or another, they’re going to run across each other and play [together]. It’s like a big family; if you’re a professional, and the guys you play with are professional, it’s not that hard.”

And the tribute band is “ producing it,” too, if the sell-out crowds and standing ovations of the last few months are any indication. Fitting response, for a time that Jimmy Cobb remembers as, “Probably one of the best jobs I ever had. I can always remember that. In fact, I got the job when I know that most of the drummers in the world wanted that job, so that makes it more special.”