Billy Cobham and his band Time Machine play the Barbican Hall on Monday 23 November 2026 at 8pm, presented by Jazz Cafe. Tickets from £39.
Billy Cobham was born in Colón, Panama in 1944 and raised in New York, and by his mid-twenties he was on the records that invented jazz fusion. He played with Miles Davis on the electric albums at the turn of the 1970s, then joined John McLaughlin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, where the drumming — enormous, fast, ambidextrous, played on a kit twice the ordinary size — became the thing every rock drummer of the decade tried to copy. He went into the Modern Drummer hall of fame in 1987 and has led his own bands ever since.
He is eighty-two and still touring, which in an instrument that punishes the body is remarkable on its own. He went into a second drummers’ hall of fame in 2013, and the fusion records he made under his own name in the mid-1970s have been sampled by two generations of producers who have never heard the albums whole.
Time Machine is his current septet, and it comes to the Barbican Hall on Monday 23 November 2026 at eight, presented by Jazz Cafe: Victor Cisternas on bass, Rocco Zifarelli on guitar, Gary Husband on keyboards, Bjorn Arko on saxophone, Andrea Andreoli on trombone and Antonio Baldino on trumpet. The programme takes his own catalogue alongside jazz and soul standards. It follows a night at Union Chapel last year, in a considerably larger room.