Billy Cobham, the drummer who helped invent jazz fusion, brings his septet Time Machine to the Barbican Hall for a night of his own catalogue and the standards that shaped it.
Billy Cobham helped invent jazz fusion drumming in the early 1970s, and at eighty-two he brings that legacy, in his septet Time Machine, to the Barbican Hall on Monday 23 November 2026.
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, playing a kit twice the ordinary size, enormous, fast and ambidextrous, built for a genre that was only starting to exist. He went into the Modern Drummer hall of fame in 1987 and has led his own bands ever since.
Touring still, in an instrument that punishes the body, he entered a second drummers’ hall of fame in 2013. The fusion albums he made under his own name in the mid-1970s have since been sampled by two generations of producers who never heard them whole.
Time Machine is his current septet, and it plays the Barbican Hall at eight, presented by Jazz Cafe, with Gary Husband on keyboards and Rocco Zifarelli on guitar among the septet’s seven players. The programme mixes his own catalogue with jazz and soul standards, following a night at Union Chapel last year, a considerably smaller room.