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Cream Jack Bruce
Cream … Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. Photograph: Dezo Hoffmann / Rex Features
Cream … Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. Photograph: Dezo Hoffmann / Rex Features

Jack Bruce: five songs that chart his journey through the 60s to Cream

This article is more than 9 years old

Here are five performances tracing the late Jack Bruce’s journey from 19-year-old upright bass player to part of rock’s first supergroup

Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated – Live on the BBC Jazz Club, 1962

Jack Bruce was only two months past his 19th birthday when this set was recorded for the BBC. It’s a startlingly clear indication of how swift the pace of change was in British music during the 1960s, for its very conservatism compared to what Bruce would be doing with Cream by 1967. Founding father of the British blues boom he might have been, but Alexis Korner’s take on the blues seems awfully polite in the context of what was to very quickly follow – especially given the presence of Charlie Watts on drums. At this point Bruce was still playing upright bass, and a jazz show was the most appropriate home for this music. The British blues have not yet been crossed with rock’n’roll; the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and the like may have been only months from forming, but the attitude they would bring to bear was light years away.

The Graham Bond Organisation – Baby Be Good to Me

The organist Graham Bond was another of the key figures of the early British R&B scene, and another bandleader who saw some of the era’s most talented musicians pass through his ranks – this was where Bruce and Ginger Baker first played together. He’s also a tragic and fascinating figure: a drug addict who suffered from mental illness, and who became increasingly obsessed with the occult and magick – he believed he was Aleister Crowley’s son. Consequently, his musical legacy is tantalisingly slight in quality, if not quantity. Baby Be Good to Me comes from the first of the two Graham Bond Organisation albums, The Sound of ’65, and serves as a fine showcase for Bruce’s lithe and nimble bass runs. Bruce, though he found fame in blues and heavy rock, was a jazz player to begin with, and the Bond band enabled him to bring those jazz chops to bear within an R&B format. With the benefit of hindsight, the Graham Bond Organisation sound like the unfulfilled blueprint for a different kind of Cool Britannia, one in which the cappuccino bars were not superseded by the psychedelic clubs.

John Mayall and the Bluebreakers – Hoochie Coochie Man

Bruce’s spell with the most prolific talent incubator in 60s British music was brief: just a few weeks in 1965, alongside Eric Clapton, before John McVie rejoined and the group recorded the definitive statement of the first wave of the British blues boom, the Blues Breakers album. What it did yield, however, was a recording Mayall himself made of the band playing at the Flamingo Club in London on 28 November 1966. Here, now, the blues is beginning to stretch out, to take flight into something a little more, well, cosmic. Clapton credited Bruce with showing him that playing the blues didn’t have to mean copying the original records to the best of one’s ability, and planting in his mind the idea for a group that used the 12-bar format as the starting point rather than a rigid plan. On this version of Hoochie Coochie Man you hear Clapton taking flight – this was the period when he was “God” – and then Bruce being unafraid to follow him with his own solo. Even for those who don’t thrill to the blues, there’s something gloriously untrammelled about this recording.

Manfred Mann – Pretty Flamingo

And here’s the first hit, from April 1966, and as far away from the Bluesbreakers as could be. It’s proof, too, of how willing the Brit bluesmen were willing to move away from the blues in pursuit of commercial success. Pretty Flamingo gave Manfred Mann a UK No 1, and sweet as it was, it was hardly a harbinger of what was to come next.

Cream – Sunshine of Your Love

One of the great riffs of rock history was written by Bruce after he and Clapton had been to see the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In the film Beware of Mr Baker, Ginger Baker makes the claim that his drumming makes the song, but however fabulous his contribution might have been, everyone knows it’s the riff. That’s why cover versions – Hendrix’s, Spanky Wilson’s soul version – are so often successful. You can’t go wrong with that fabulous riff. Cream’s greatest legacy to rock might have been in promoting the idea of self-indulgence – drum solos! Epic jams! Twenty-minute blues workouts! – but there was another side to them: the taut, tense songs that Bruce and lyricist wrote for the group: Sunshine, The White Room, I Feel Free. It’s not surprising that it’s these, rather than Crossroads or Toad, that live on among those who aren’t Cream loyalists.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Jack Bruce obituary

  • Cream bassist Jack Bruce dies aged 71 after a lifetime in blues

  • Jack Bruce – a life in pictures

  • Jack Bruce, former Cream man, dies aged 71

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