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The Career Of Jimmy Cobb

Jazz Unlimited for Sunday, May 1, 2016 will be “The Career of Jimmy Cobb.”  Best known for his associations with Miles Davis and the Wynton Kelly Trio, drummer Jimmy Cobb is now 87 and still going strong.  He was born in Washington D.C. in 1929 and was first heard in 1948 with Dinah Washington and Dizzy Gillespie.  We will hear selections from his career that span the years from 1954 to 2014 with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Dinah Washington, the Gil Evans Orchestra, Bobby Timmons, Wes Montgomery, the Wynton Kelly Trio, Kenny Dorham, Frank Strozier, Booker Little, Sarah Vaughan, Johnny Griffin, Akiko Tsuruga, Bertha Hope, Hamiet Bluiett, Nat Adderley, Mark Murphy. Jon Hendricks and Joe Henderson.

The Slide Show contains my photographs of some of the musicians heard on this Show.

The Archive of this Show will be available until the morning of May 8, 2016.

Here is the famous clip of Miles Davis (tp) John Coltrane (ts) Wynton Kelly (p) Paul Chambers (b) and Jimmy Cobb (d) with the Gil Evans Orchestra on the Robert Herridge Theater in 1959 playing "So What."

Dennis Owsley has broadcast a weekly jazz show for St. Louis Public Radio since April 1983. He holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and is a retired Monsanto Senior Science Fellow and college teacher. His show, Jazz Unlimited, airs every Sunday from 9:00 p.m. to midnight. The show has the largest jazz audience in St. Louis and was named Best Jazz Radio Show in St. Louis for the years 2005-2007 and 2009 by the Riverfront Times. In celebration of his 25 years on the air, January 24, 2008 was proclaimed Dennis Owsley Day" in the City of St. Louis. He is the 2010 winner of the St. Louis Public Radio Millard S. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award. Dennis is also a noted photographer, and his exhibit, In the Moment: Photographs of Jazz Musicians, ran from September 23, 2005 to January 21, 2006 at the Sheldon Art Gallery. He is a lifetime student of jazz history and teaches short courses on the subject. Dennis is the author of the award-winning book City of Gabriels: The History of Jazz in St. Louis 1985-1973, published in 2006.