Jimmy Cobb, Grover Washington Jr., Don Braden, and Branford Marsalis, among others, have featured compositions written by Cosby on their own albums. He has been awarded a Kennedy Center honor, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Marian Anderson award in recognition of how he helped to change society through the Arts. Since 1986 he has been the Honorary Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute. He was personally responsible for programming the music that guided the crowds into the festival grounds and settled in for the show. For more than 30 years he hosted the Playboy Jazz Festival (held at the Hollywood Bowl), recently passing that responsibility on to George Lopez in 2013. Much of his jazz advocacy is less well known. Several episodes of his show had vignettes of him arguing with his wife or friends over the trivia of particular tunes, their labels, and recording dates, further burnishing his jazz fanatic bone fides. One year it was Bobby McFerrin, another, Craig Handy, Lester Bowie, even Jr. Later albums included covers of great jazz standards with all-star combos.īetty Carter, Joe Williams, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Lena Horne, and Nancy Wilson, among many others, all were guest stars with dramatic roles on the 1980s “Cosby Show.” Each season he had different musicians reinterpret the theme for that show. Cosby wrote in the liner notes that side A – “Martin’s Funeral” was his musical imagining the funeral procession for the fallen civil rights leader. In 1971 he put out Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Funeral and Marching Band, an LP with only two extended full-side tracks much in the style of Miles Davis’ electric period. Jam sessions from the early “Bill Cosby Show” (in which he played gym teacher Chet Kincaid), recorded in 1969, were not released until 2004, and include his then theme song “Hikky-Burr” and featured musicians such as Jimmy Smith, Eddie Harris, Ray Brown and Monty Alexander. They moved to Hollywood around the same time and collaborated frequently.Cosby himself recorded at least five albums of jazz using some of the finest musicians of the day. Cosby and Quincy Jones have been friends for more than 50 years. “Fat Albert Rotunda” was composed and performed by Herbie Hancock. Even kids watching his cartoons were exposed to jazz. His imitations of John Coltrane were so accurate that Trane’s quartet would invite him on stage at Birdland to “play” Coltrane, a complex mimicry of the saxophonist’s crouched stance, mannerisms, fingering, and his actual sound from Cosby’s amazingly accurate scatting.įrom “I-Spy” (1965-68) to “The Cosby Show” (1984-92), all of his television shows found ways to feature jazz musicians and their music. During the start of his celebrity, he used his stature to bring attention to the musicians and music that came out of the Village Gate Mondays’ “Latin Meets Jazz” where he could sometimes be found playing the cowbell on the side of the stage. He said Max Roach drove him to comedy.īill Cosby has been a friend, an ally, and a champion of Jazz from his early beginnings. Check out the hysterical YouTube video of him on the Dick Cavett show explaining one night on the bandstand when Sonny Stitt showed up and dashed his musical aspirations by calling for Cherokee to be played at high speed. Early on he fancied himself a drummer and even sat in with folks like Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott. Cosby and his friends would memorize tunes, riffs, and the details of jazz musicians and their records like other youth would do with sports heroes. And girls who knew who Lee Morgan was were more attractive than those who didn’t have a clue. It was also for developing a sense of style, fashion and, of course, for getting girls. As he tells it, for him jazz was not only for listening pleasure but also was intellectually challenging. He also listened to the dance bands of Illinois Jacquet, Tiny Bradshaw, and Red Prysock. Bill Cosby was one of the first to really understand this relationship.Ī Philadelphia native, Bill Cosby grew up listening to the modern jazz of his day - Dizzy& Bird, Brubeck, Monk and Bud Powell. It is not hard to see a natural parallel between the fearless and in-the-moment improvisations of jazz and stand-up comedy. They also performed completely original and free-flowing compositions. In another club across town jazz artists did away with traditional head-melody / chorus / head-style of playing and began improvising freely (think Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”). In the early 1960s, a young comic stepped up to the microphone in a Greenwich Village nightclub and instead of offering a predictable run of non-stop jokes a la Rodney Dangerfield he told stories and riffed on personal and social experiences. Matthew Goldwasser reviews Bill Cosby's contributions to jazz, with TV show clip
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