Collection: Billy Cobham

By the time Billy Cobham recorded "Spectrum" in 1973, he had already spent five years at the centre of the music that would define the decade. Born in Colón, Panama and raised in Brooklyn, he came up through the U.S. Army Band, joined Horace Silver's quintet in 1968, and moved quickly into session work for Creed Taylor's CTI label, where he appeared on albums by George Benson, Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws, and Grover Washington Jr. His work with Miles Davis on "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" and "Big Fun" followed, and then the Mahavishnu Orchestra, where his playing on "The Inner Mounting Flame" (1971) and "Birds of Fire" (1973) alongside John McLaughlin set a new benchmark for what a drummer could do in a fusion context: polyrhythmic, loud, technically exacting, and swinging in a way that rock drumming generally wasn't. "Spectrum", recorded after Mahavishnu's original lineup dissolved, was a leader debut that reached number one on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart, and its opening track "Stratus" became one of the most sampled drum performances in recorded music, later appearing in Massive Attack's "Safe from Harm". The Atlantic albums that followed through the mid-1970s, particularly "Crosswinds" (1974) with John Abercrombie and George Duke, and the live "Shabazz" from Montreux, show the period at full stretch.