How does a teenager drafted into a U.S. Army band end up a few years later behind a spaceship-sized drum kit, pioneering jazz fusion and jamming with the Grateful Dead? This episode follows Billy Cobham from his birth in Panama in 1944 and a childhood in Brooklyn, where his father worked as a hospital statistician by week and played piano by weekend, to New York’s High School of Music and Art, three years of military precision after being drafted in 1965, and gigs with Horace Silver and as a session player for Atlantic and CTI Records.

The conversation explores the jazz-rock group Dreams, recordings with Miles Davis on A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Big Fun, and the 1971 co-founding of the Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin, where odd time signatures met heavy-metal volume. It then examines his 1973 solo debut Spectrum, the acoustic reasoning behind flared fiberglass North toms and clear acrylic shells, the chain-drive bass drum pedal developed with Al Duffy, his open-handed playing style, a 1980 sit-in with the Grateful Dead, the band Bobby and the Midnites, and an influence that reaches Bill Bruford, Danny Carey, Prince, Jeff Beck, and Phil Collins.

• Why an army band’s rigid grid was the ultimate boot camp rather than a career interruption
• How anchoring a band in 19/16 time demands a military internal clock and jazz reflexes
• Why three kick drums and a 36-inch gong were acoustic necessity, not rock-star excess
• How uncrossing his arms freed his right hand to sweep the entire kit
• How Cobham proved a drum kit could carry melody and narrative as a lead instrument