Another big loss for jazz

Drummer Jimmy Cobb, for 29 years the only surviving member of trumpeter Miles Davis' Kind of Blue sextet, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91 and had been battling lung cancer.

Jimmy Cobb, Tanglewood Jazz Festival, 2011

Cobb was the fourth NEA Jazz Master to pass away in 2020. In addition to the seminal Kind of Blue album, he was the drummer on Miles' Sketches of Spain, Someday My Prince Will Come, Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, 1958 Miles, Jazz at the Plaza, In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk Complete (recorded in 1961 in San Francisco), Quiet Nights, Miles and Monk at Newport; and briefly on Porgy and Bess, and Sorcerer.

His many other major musical affiliations over the years included work with singers Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, pianists Wynton Kelly and Bobby Timmons, trumpeter Nat Adderley, saxophonists Richie Cole and Sonny Stitt, and guitarist Wes Montgomery. The Washington DC-born Cobb, who was pretty much self-taught, also led his own band of younger players, Cobb's Mob.