The last surviving member of that landmark album’s sextet, he was a master of understatement, propelling his bandmates with a quiet persistence.
Jimmy Cobb, a jazz drummer whose propulsive ride cymbal imbued countless classic recordings with a quiet intensity, including Miles Davis’s epochal album “Kind of Blue,” died on Sunday in Harlem. He was 91.
The cause was lung cancer, according to his daughter Serena Cobb. As the only surviving member of the “Kind of Blue” sextet, Mr. Cobb had long been hailed as the last apostle of a defining moment in American music.
His great talent was his ability to play understatedly, almost casually, without letting the beat or the momentum sag. He rarely took a solo.
“I was just trying to get it done,” he said in a 2010 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, adding, “You have to be at the right place at the right time with the right stuff, and then you got a chance.”
On spirited performances led by the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, whispery jazz standards sung by Sarah Vaughan, dreamier late-career collaborations with the pianist Geri Allen, and thousands of albums and gigs in between, Mr. Cobb goaded his bandmates by holding steady. In his hands, persistence didn’t mean insisting, and an even keel never felt like a bore.
Released in 1959, “Kind of Blue” — with Mr. Davis’s trumpet backed by Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, and Mr. Cobb on drums — received warm reviews, but its immortality accrued only over time. Through changes in fashion and dips in jazz’s popularity, its brooding, translucent aura has never gone out of style. It is widely known as the best-selling album in jazz history, and last year the Recording Industry Association of America announced that it had surpassed five million copies sold worldwide.
For most of its tunes, Mr.
