Recommendations of the Editorial team
When Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce founded Cream in 1966, Clapton insisted on Bruce as the band’s bass players, although Bruce and Baker rubbed each other right from the start. The decision to work as a trio was only made after numerous candidates had been tested for the position of the singer, including Ray Phillips from the Nashville Teens and Steve Winwood from Spencer Davis Group. Clapton was aware that Bruce was not an easy average musician who could play the individual bass tones a little in a band. In the mixture of blues, rock and experimental sounds, Bruce interpreted the instrument much more far than most of his professionals of that time (John escapes once).
“Jack Bruce definitely opened my eyes to what a bass player can do live,” said Black-Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler. “I mainly went to Cream because of Clapton, but I was fascinated by Jack Bruce ‘game. I didn’t know that a bass player could do these things by stepping in where the rhythm guitar is normally.”
What the audience liked and sold the band between 1966 and 1968 million plates, however, caused discomfort inside. Clapton once called the excessive live improvisations “endless, meaningless solos”. They did not play Cream because they liked them themselves, but because the audience expected it to. The Chicago Blues standard “Spoonful” was stretched over more than a quarter of an hour when recording from the filmore in San Franciso.
The point where it could no longer go on was quickly reached after just two years. After a US tour and two farewell concerts in the Royal Albert Hall in London, Cream dissolved.
“I didn’t adopt the music, the music adopted me.”
Jack Bruce was born on May 14, 1943 in Bishopsbriggs, a small town north of Glasgow. His parents belonged to the working class, strongly left -wing beliefs were part of Bruce. “My mother sang Scottish folk songs and my father was a big fan of the traditional jazz of people like Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong. But my older brother loved modern jazz. There were literally physical battles in our house between my father and brother, who argued about the role of the saxophone in jazz or something,” remembered Bruce. “I didn’t adopt the music, the music adopted me.”
Bruce sang as a teenager in a church choir and visited the Royal Scottish Academy of Music to study the piano and cello. Studying that he did not complete, but the cello had a strong impact on his bass game. Johann Sebastian Bach, whose compositions he had learned on the cello, wrote the best bass runs of all time, said Bruce ‘conviction.
From Alexis Korner to Marvin Gaye
At the beginning of the 60s, Jack Bruce was looking for contact with the Blues scene in London. He played in various groups, met Ginger Baker (who already found Bruce ‘game was too hectic) and finally joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. “Working with Alexis was the most formative and most important time of my life,” he said later. In 1965 he was offered an offer that almost led to the Cream would never have been created. Marvin Gaye asked him to play in his band, but Bruce declined.
“At that time I had to take a lot of criticism because I played too many grades. Because I played bass in a certain way,” he later told Guitar Magazine. “But Marvin loved my game, so I realized that I had to do something right. It would have been astonishing if a white one had been and part of this scene.
Jack Bruce’s cause of death
In the decades after the dissolution of Cream, Jack Bruce continued to work undeterred and gave little attention to the financial chances of success of his music. In numerous jazz and blues bands, he did what he felt like-and overcame his heroin addiction. With Ginger Baker and Gary Moore, he founded the short -lived BBM and also played in Charlie Watts Bigband and Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band.
In 2003 the years of the excess first demanded their toll. Doctors diagnosed liver cancer that required a transplant. Jack Bruce immune system initially pushed off the new organ and at the same time fought with pneumonia that almost cost him life. Despite everything, the musician, whom Roger Waters described as the “most musically talented bass player ever”, recovered. Just two years later, Cream was the reunion of Cream at individual concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Royal Albert Hall, in which the band had celebrated its farewell forty years earlier.
Jack Bruce finally succumbed to the consequences of the operation eleven years after the liver transplant. On October 25, 2014, he died of liver failure in Suffolk, England. He was 71 years old.