Billy Cobham was born May 16, 1944, in Colón, Panama, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a pianist and Cobham was playing along with him by age four. After being discharged from the Army in 1968, he settled into the New York jazz scene and became a member of the Horace Silver Quintet. He landed a spot in Miles Davis's new fusion ensemble not long after, playing on the seminal Bitches Brew sessions and appearing more prominently on later Davis albums, including Live-Evil and A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

Cobham and guitarist John McLaughlin split off from Davis's orbit to pursue a harder-rocking strain of fusion in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which debuted in 1971 with The Inner Mounting Flame, the band's original lineup alongside violinist Jerry Goodman, keyboardist Jan Hammer, and bassist Rick Laird. Cobham's explosive technique got its fullest airing yet in that band, and his playing went on to influence countless fusion drummers and prog-rock players who came after him. He debuted as a leader in 1973 with Spectrum, widely considered a genre-defining fusion record, and spent much of fusion's commercial peak recording for Atlantic Records.

Cobham's explosive, technically virtuosic drumming, developed across Miles Davis's electric period and the original Mahavishnu Orchestra lineup, is widely credited as fusion's most influential drumming voice, a benchmark for the genre's rhythmic vocabulary that later players, in fusion and beyond, measured themselves against.