Ginger Baker's Beef
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Ginger Baker's Beef By MARC MYERS October 8, 2013 Ginger Baker was out of cigarettes. Reclining in a thick teens looking for hell-raising rock role models. Just don't ask brown leather easy chair in his living room, the drummer if he was stoned. reached for a cellphone and called his fourth and current wife, bellowing for another pack. Dressed in blue-and- "Oh for god's sake, I've never played rock," Mr. Baker turquoise socks, jeans with the belt undone, and a white snapped. "Cream was two jazz players and a blues guitarist ribbed T-shirt, Mr. Baker sharply rebuffed a visitor's playing improvised music. We never played the same thing suggestion that he skip the smokes, saying he could do as two nights running. Jack and I had been in jazz bands for he pleased. When the cigarettes arrived, Mr. Baker resumed years. All that stuff I did on the drums in Cream didn't come chain smoking while answering questions about his health, from drugs, either—it was from me. It was jazz." his jazz roots and his legacy as the father of modern rock Unlike musicians who turn to jazz when their rock careers drumming. slow, Mr. Baker actually came up through London's jazz scene in the 1950s. He was first exposed to jazz drumming at age 14 after hearing "Quintet of the Year"—an all-star bebop album recorded live in 1953 at Toronto's Massey Hall. "I couldn't believe all the things Max Roach was doing on the drums—I was blown away." Years of beating his hands on school desks followed before Mr. Baker first sat behind a drum set at a party in 1956. "Friends forced me to go and play, and I was quite good. That's when I realized I was a drummer and would always be a drummer." Mr. Baker's fist paid gig was with the Storyville Jazzmen in 1957—a band that played New Orleans-style jazz. "Trad jazz was virtually all that was happening in England at the time. Les Wood, the clarinetist, gave me a load of records by drummer Baby Dodds. They were quite a revelation. What I "I'm in pain 24 hours a day—I have degenerative arthritis of got is you play by listening to other musicians." the spine, and the painkillers only let me cope," said the 74- year-old Mr. Baker with a scowl as he watched English Mr. Baker toured Europe with several jazz ensembles, soccer on a muted flat-screen television. The night before, including one that backed gospel-R&B singer Sister Rosetta he had been in London performing with his band, Jazz Tharpe. As Mr. Baker moved among London's modern jazz Confusion—a quartet that starts a U.S. tour in New Hope, groups in 1959 and 1960, he met Phil Seamen—one of Pa., on Tuesday. "I love playing our music, but I hate the England's most innovative jazz drummers. "Phil told stories traveling. It's more difficult for me now." with his sticks and turned me on to recordings of African drummers. I got the African time straight away and Phil was One enters Mr. Baker's personal space with caution. He is impressed." But Seamen also introduced Mr. Baker to notoriously curt—behavior aggravated by his joint pain and heroin, which would become an on-and-off addiction for the declining hearing after years performing in front of powerful next 21 years. speakers. Interview questions were met with a thundering "Whut?" while answers began with expletives, grunts or In 1961 and '62, Mr. Baker continued playing jazz—including combative retorts. Riled in the 2012 documentary "Beware of gigs with the Bert Courtley Sextet, where he first met Mr. Mr. Baker," Mr. Baker whacked the film's director on the Bruce. As the English economy improved in the early 1960s nose with his cane. and a more youthful London emerged, many younger jazz players gravitated to big-beat blues and R&B bands, which Mr. Baker has always been impulsive. In 1966 he envisioned offered more work and better pay. Cream—rock's first supergroup, with guitarist Eric Clapton and bassist Jack Bruce. During the trio's two-year run, Mr. One of those bands was Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. Baker's expressive polyrhythmic playing elevated the drums "Charlie Watts was the drummer and a big fan of mine. He to equal standing with the electric guitar and bass. In concert gave up the drum chair for me in '62. Charlie told me he back then, Mr. Baker's flame-red hair, wide eyes and didn't want to be a musician, that there wasn't any security in possessed expressions during lengthy, freewheeling solos it. Can you imagine? A short time later, Mick [Jagger] and made him an antihero for a generation of pencil-beating Brian [Jones] said they were forming a band and needed a After Cream, Mr. Baker joined Blind Faith with Mr. Clapton, drummer. I recommended Charlie." bassist Ric Grech and keyboard player Steve Winwood. When the group folded in 1969, Mr. Baker formed a jazz-rock In 1964, Korner's alto saxophonist and organist Graham fusion band and then moved to Nigeria in 1970, where he Bond left to form an R&B band—taking Messrs. Baker and founded the first of several world-music ensembles. Mr. Bruce with him and adding John McLaughlin. The Graham Baker also performed with jazz drummers Art Blakey and Bond Organization's "Oh Baby" in 1965 features one of Mr. Elvin Jones. "They were drum battles that turned into duets. Baker's earliest recorded drum solos. "The band was a They became my friends and accepted me as playing at the whole new bag—funky and commercial," Mr. Baker said. "I same level as them." was able to try different things." Last year, after living in South Africa, Mr. Baker returned to When the Bond band began to disintegrate in 1966 as live in England with his wife and her teenage daughter. What members squabbled, Mr. Baker said he decided to form his does Mr. Baker think of Cream fans and critics who consider own band with Mr. Clapton. Mr. Bruce was their choice for him a rock drummer? "I don't give a damn what people bassist. For the next two years, Cream revolutionized rock think—I move forward," he said. "When people put with long, improvised solos and psychedelic imagery. drummers like John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell and Keith Moon "Crowds got larger, and Jack kept adding more Marshall in the same bag as me, it's really insulting. I have a gift, and amps. The louder sound damaged my hearing. By '68, I none of them is even on the same street as me. The fact that couldn't take it any more. The last year of Cream was very I can still play is a miracle, isn't it?" painful." Mr. Myers writes daily about music at JazzWax.com. REVIEW: Ginger Baker at Bucks County Playhouse shows that, even diminished, he's Cream of drummers John J. Moser , October 9, 2013 Photos by Brian Hineline/Special to The Morning Call Midway through his concert Tuesday at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, legendary rock drummer Ginger Baker made what may be a first in music: An acknowledgment that the skills that made Cream and Blind Faith such rock powerhouses, and essentially was the archetype of rock drummer, have diminished. “I want people to understand,” he told the nearly sold-out audience for the opening show of his first American tour in 17 years. “I’m 74 years old and I’ve got a lot of physical limitations. If I can’t play all you want me to, I’m sorry. But I do my best.” The irony was that the apology was unnecessary. Unless someone went to the show mistakenly expecting Baker’s 1960s rock repertoire, it was a perfectly enjoyable night of jazz that was better than most music you’ll hear, and offered Baker’s still formidable skills – and even flashes of what they once were. In a concert that offered nine songs in 85 minutes of music (plus and intermission), Baker did pretty much everything right. He played songs that were percussion-oriented, though that might have been the result of Baker’s band, His Jazz Confusion, being made up of him, another percussionist and a bassist, with just a sax providing melody. He surrounded himself with players of the highest caliber. And when he spoke, he was delightfully contrary and prickly—not in an unpleasant way, but in the endearing manner of a crotchety uncle. “Ginger!” someone from the crowd shouted before a song. “Be quiet!” he shouted back, in the was someone would chasten a child. When people in the crowd hooted enthusiastically after an especially good excursion on the Ron Miles’ song “Ginger Spice,” Baker quipped, “Stop heckling! Really, behave yourselves.” (He had introduced the song by sardonically noting Miles had “never heard of the Spice Girls.”) In fact, Baker was almost grandfatherly in his appearance: Bespectacled, his famous ginger hair now mostly white and receding, dressed in a plum dress shirt. But his playing, and that of his band, was very good, indeed. The show opened with Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” – reserved jazz, heavy on sax from accomplished player Pee Wee Ellis. Baker spent most of the song on the cymbals, and the crowd cheered when his playing first came to the front.