Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion hits right note at Cathedral Quarter MUSIC REVIEW: Ginger Baker @ Fesival Marquee, Belfast published 08.05.14 Don’t let people tell you that Ginger Baker is grumpy. With a droll wit and a tinder dry sense of humour, the 74 year-old drummer gave Belfast a night to remember, with his jazz fusion style in the band he calls Jazz Confusion, playing for a packed and hushed marquee, as part of Cathedral Quarter Arts festival. Jazz giant Pee Wee Ellis couldn’t make the gig, as he was having an operation on his lip - “a problem for a horn-player” said Baker wryly, whilst wishing him all the best. Fortunately, as he said “jazz musicians can read music” and so veteran sax-player Andy Sheppard was able to step in and do a sterling job, even after Baker introduced him as “Alan.” It seemed like the evening was faltering, when Baker also told us he didn’t have his normal drums and that his drum roadie was off, “doing an exam, or something.” But with his grinning Ghanaian “friend and bodyguard” Abass DoDoo on buoyant percussion to beat out an African rhythm, Baker relaxed into a physically gruelling set, showing many flashes of his old brilliance, when he was a member of supergroup Cream. “This one’s a mindblower, a Baker destroyer,” he’d growl and launch into Ginger Spice. Then another African vibe came to play, with a “song I wrote in Algeria, after I drove off the side of one of the Atlas mountains and ended up in an olive tree.” Visibly gasping for breath, he took a break, but returned in fine form, prompting a couple of shout-outs from the audience. “Hecklers will be shot,” he joked, to loud laughs from the crowd. Classics in the set, with a workmanlike Alec Dankworth on bass came from the pen of Thelonius Monk and a final crowd-pleaser from Sonny Rollins, when Baker returned for an encore, sent us happy into the night. Ginger, you’re a genius and a survivor. Keep on drumming. LIZ KENNEDY Master class from great survivor Ginger Baker BY MICHAEL CONAGHAN – 08 MAY 2014 Drummers are music's awkward squad, like Shakespeare's lunatics, lovers and poets "of imagination all compact". None more so than Ginger Baker. As a recent documentary demonstrated, his verbal percussion pounds with the same intensity as one of his drum solos. Yet he is one of rock's great survivors. Frail he may be, but the expertise remains. Opener Footprints was a gentle way in, low on pyrotechnics but full of rhythm and the odd hearty thump, especially in tandem with the impressive Abass Dodoo from Ghana. It was a reminder of Baker's links with African music and he repeated the same trick with greater power in Ginger Spice. When asked if he was getting into jazz, John Lennon once allegedly replied: "I've been trying to avoid it all my life." Make no mistake, this was a jazz concert through and through, the touchstones for this great 60s legend being Thelonious Monk rather than Chuck Berry. This meant that there was the jazz band's tendency to fiddle while a tune burns. But when Baker began to let rip in the second half of the show, this frail man delivered something of a percussion master class. Ginger Baker review – cantankerous ex-Cream drummer powers on Islington Academy, London The frenzied intensity that made him 'the world's greatest drummer' is gone, but he still plays with flair and authority Mark Beaumont The Guardian, Monday 5 May 2014 13.31 BST Ginger Baker at the Islington Academy. Photograph: Brigitte Engl/Redferns/Getty Images "Everybody's on at me to play Toad," wheezes Ginger Baker, fielding yet another catcall for the maniacal five- minute drum solo from Cream's 1966 debut album that left every kit cowed and quaking. "But it's not on. I'm 75 and I'm a fucking cripple." It's the closest this one- off launch gig for Baker's crowdfunded anthology, A Drummer's Tale, gets to unleashing his notoriously cantankerous nature. The 2012 documentary Beware of Mr Baker celebrated his spectacular – and spectacularly influential – skins skills, while indulging a tongue as barbed as a prison perimeter and rolling out rafts of ex-bandmates attesting to antisocial behaviour worthy of a minor-league despot. Tonight, however, the pleasure of performance, and his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, mellow him to a breathless but thankful huff. Baker's too frail to reach the levels of frenzied intensity that gained him the reputation of greatest drummer ever. But, accompanied by bass and saxophone and flanked by mountainous sidekick Abass Dodoo on a comically toytown percussion set, he presides over the shifting jazzsignatures of Wayne Shorter's Footprints with flair, authority and a stoic grimace. Tonight, his focus is on jazz vehicles for intricate, impressive drum duets with Dodoo, and on Afrobeat numbers stretching back to his work with Fela Kuti in the 70s. But when he's joined by vocalist Lynne Jackaman from Saint Jude for Cream's Sunshine of Your Love there's real magic in hearing him pound out the marching diplodocus beats that saw him credited with having helped found hard rock, an honour he detests. "I'm knackered," Baker says as he cuts the set short an hour in. "This may be a posthumous rendition of my new song Why?" The wonder is that he never really seemed to struggle, and still he's drawn out once more, battling through a virtuoso solo beyond the call on Sonny Rollins' carnival ska ditty St Thomas. Clearly, at a fragile 75, he'll lick anything but Toad. Hi-hats off. 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.