Ginger Baker knew and understood jazz; you've probably just never heard him play it. With Cream, Blind Faith, Air Force, Baker Gurvitz Army, Masters of Reality and most any other Baker alliance you've encountered, the flame-haired demon played rock and blues. He was an instrumental composer -- his job, to invent the most exciting and appropriate rhythms to complement each song.
For many, though, Baker opened the door to jazz. While working within straightforward beats, he might execute jazzlike counterrhythms, superimpose one time signature over another, hit unpredictable accents. And of course he improvised. But listen to the long live version of "Spoonful" on Cream's "Wheels of Fire" album, and you'll find him repeating riffs he's come up with -- for a rock audience, he emphasized hooks. Trance-inducing repetition (Blind Faith's "Do What You Like"), a legacy of the African drumming he loved, was another Baker color, often surfacing through the mallets he rolled across his tomtoms.
So although we might think of Ginger Baker as the ice-eyed Cockney maniac who narrated "Pressed Rat and Warthog," at heart he was the most disciplined and tasteful of musicians. Thinking back on the long list of popworld artists with whom Baker collaborated, we can hardly think of one who rose higher without him.
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Jazzwise, the most involving thing about this 1995 trio performance with Charlie Haden and Bill Frisell is Baker's solo, which starts just after the 9-minute mark. Intimidated by big jazz names he was not.