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The Pacific Jazz Institute at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley presents Pan-American jazz drummer, composer, and bandleader Billy Cobham for four nights touring in support of his latest release Palindrome (6-29-10). Band members joining Mr. Cobham are Jean-Marie Ecay (guitars), Fifi Chayeb (bass), Christopher Cravero (keys/violin), Camelia Ben Naceur (keys) and Junior Gill (steel pan). Set times Thursday through Saturday at 7:30pm and 9:30pm and Sunday at 7:30pm. Doors open at 6:00pm Thursday and 5:30pm Friday - Sunday.

Legendary percussionist Billy Cobham is back to grace the Jazz Alley stage once again, this time in support of his latest release Palindrome (6-29-10 by Varese Sarabande Records and Fontana Distribution). Considered the founding father of an entire approach to the instrument, Mr. Cobham is revered the world over as a true master of his trade. He has pursued an ever-broadening, ever-deepening engagement with the world not only as a master drummer and percussionist but as a composer, producer, educator, and clinician who gives service through music even as he constantly expands his personal creative expression.

Panamanian by birth, a New Yorker by upbringing, and a resident of Switzerland for more than 25 years, Billy Cobham had his stage debut with his father at the age of eight. He developed his seriously voracious appetite of drumming in the highly competitive Drum and Bugle Corps. Arena with St. Catherine’s Queensmen, prompting him to attend New York’s famed High School of Music and Art to study music theory and drum technique with seminars by such renowned artists as Thelonious Monk and Stan Getz.

Since his breakthrough in the early 1970s, Billy has performed on hundreds of records with his own groups and with some of the music’s most luminary artists, such as Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin, Freddie Hubbard, Larry Coryell, and Horace Silver Band. Unwilling to settle upon one direction in music, he has “resigned [him]self to projecting ideas and thoughts through a musical kaleidoscope, from Latin to rock and jazz.” His stylistic influence, which has literally created a new genre, is an outstanding part of the history of modern music. In 2009, Cobham’s music documentary film Sonic Mirror was released and he also collaborated in a recording with oud player Chaouki Smahi and the late great alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano. Most recently, Cobham released the recording Palindrome, the second installment, after 2008’s Fruit From the Loom (CMMC Records), in a planned four volume set that he hopes to complete by 2013.

www.billycobham.com