The group isn't exactly swinging hard, but worth a listen as they were just young uns, and a few years out from becoming what they became.
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Double Bass Doxy 1963 - Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Ginger Baker, Graham Bond
- Thread starter Carl Hillman
- Start date
When I hear the name Ginger Baker, I don't think swing. He was great with Cream of course. Nice little time capsule there!
A couple of years ago someone posted on a guitar forum that McLaughlin never swung in his life, so I posted this Doxy clip in reply. He sounds a little tentative in places, but he knew how to swing in a jazz context.
If all you know is Baker's rock playing, of course you don't associate him with jazz swing playing. But he was a highly accomplished straight-ahead jazz guy for the first part of his career. (Both he and Jack Bruce were huge fans of Ornette Coleman's free jazz, which is one of the reasons their live playing in Cream was so outside in places. Poor Eric!)
Even Jack, his mortal frenemy, who was himself a fierce upright player, always said Baker was the greatest jazz drummer in Great Britain and the equal of anyone in the world.
Check out his drum battles with, e.g., Art Blakey in the late '60's and his late-in-life band, Ginger Baker's Jazz Confusion, which consisted of him on drums, an African percussionist, a bassist, and the great Pee Wee Ellis on tenor. Baker's playing is sensitive, simple, and beautiful in those last recordings.
Now if only John, Jack and Ginger had gotten together again after Cream broke up...
That recording of Doxy was issued on this 2-LP set, released in 1970 with rather misleading credits on the cover features nine tracks from 1966 after Jack, John and Ginger had left. There are three live tracks from 1963, including this one. The album can be streamed on the usual platforms and a European CD release is still available.
That recording of Doxy was issued on this 2-LP set, released in 1970 with rather misleading credits on the cover features nine tracks from 1966 after Jack, John and Ginger had left. There are three live tracks from 1963, including this one. The album can be streamed on the usual platforms and a European CD release is still available.
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Jack and John in 1968, Dick Heckstall Smith on sax, Jon Hiseman on drums. This song was part of the Graham Bond repertoire but it didn’t sound like this!
What's interesting to me on this is how polite McLaughlin's approach to guitar was at this point. There's a rough, loosely jagged quality about his playing that I really notice around the late 60s (Extrapolation, Tony Williams Lifetime and the Miles albums), and that he started to move on from as the 70s went on. And now I'm wondering if that's something he consciously developed for a more raucous sound when the Bond group went R&B, rather than how he'd always played.
In 1963 that was without a doubt Phil Seamen, not Ginger Baker. Louis Moholo, Tony Oxley, Bryan Spring and Tony Levin come into the story a few years later...
I dig Jack's playing here! I've never heard him play acoustic before, although I knew he had. He was a big influence on me as an electric bassist. Thanks for posting!
I suspect Jack B. was mostly referring to drummers he'd personally worked or gigged with. Of course, Phil Seamen was a close friend and mentor of Baker's and, IIRC, was Baker's teacher early on. Baker himself never claimed to be better than Seamen
Or better than any other jazz drummer, come to think of it. He seemed to have retained his hero worship of all the jazz drummers he grew up listening to.
Most of his grumbling about, e.g., John Bonham not being able to swing a sack of [excrement] probably came down to his frustration at being typecast as a rock drummer. He apparently genuinely couldn't understand why so many people revered rock drummers when, in his mind, and fairly or unfairly, rock drummers were to jazz drummers as cowboy-chord folk guitarists were to jazz guys.
I'll note that I said, "I don't think swing," when I hear the name Ginger Baker, not that he didn't play jazz. I'm generally aware of Baker's background ... I've heard a few things from earlier on in his career ... . He had great facility, but an example like his drum battle with Art Blakey does not find Ginger swinging, imo. Perhaps not all jazz swings ... definitely not all people playing jazz swing.
Swing is like walking down the street, just needs a feel and tempo, not complicated or requiring of blazing technique. (Though it certainly allows for great technique, like say, Buddy Rich.)
About 20 years ago, I mentioned to a bass teacher that Jack Bruce of Cream had played jazz on an upright as well as playing electric in rock bands. He laughed outright and said he could tell from the few Cream songs that he'd heard on the radio that their bass player wouldn't know what to do with an upright.
Hot take: I think of Baker the way I think of Elvin Jones. Both thoroughly schooled in bop jazz playing, but then going beyond to create entirely new styles.
I don't know how Jones came up with his revolutionary approach, but it was Baker's intensive study of African drumming that led him to switch from the traditional cymbal-centered bop style to one that relied heavily on the toms and bass drum.
The style worked superlatively well, by sheer coincidence, with Cream. Competing with Marshall stacks in increasingly deafening live shows, conventional jazzy cymbal finesse wouldn't have come across, especially given that drums were not yet being mic'ed. (Compare early amateur recordings from the audience of Mitch Mitchell with Hendrix: his superb jazzy cymbal work is often all but inaudible.)
The Blakey/Baker "drum battles" show Blakey as the master of traditional bop jazz that he was. But Baker was already well into his new style by that point. Apples and oranges. Judging Baker as failing at traditional swinging reminds me of Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis dismissing Miles Davis's electric period. (Miles: "What do they want me to do? Play Stella by Starlight in a zoot suit?")
Here's some later jazz playing by Baker. People who only know him as a bitter old man (after having been a bitter young man) might be surprised. He's clearly having the time of his life, grinning like the guileless goofball that he apparently actually was, playing his beloved jazz with musicians he respects.
Nice clip. Sounds great.
Having said that, I hear Baker still having a bit of a heavy hand ... it works and carries Baker's flourishes and so on, but it's on the klumpier side of swingin' gotta say. Not a guy who springs to mind with the word "swing", imo, ymmv, etc. ...
Those other two, Hayden and Frisell, are definitely a couple of cool cats!
Nice clip. Sounds great.
Having said that, I hear Baker still having a bit of a heavy hand ... it works and carries Baker's flourishes and so on, but it's on the klumpier side of swingin' gotta say. Not a guy who springs to mind with the word "swing", imo, ymmv, etc. ...
Those other two, Hayden and Frisell, are definitely a couple of cool cats!
Yes, a matter of taste. Just as I'm happy to listen to Miles's electric band material, I love everyone's playing in the video.
That said, some of the impression of heavy-handedness is obviously a consequence of the way the trio's concert was mixed.
Baker is using brushes most of the time, so the balance on stage must have been nearly perfect. But setting the mic levels so that his brushwork was fully audible in the audience and on the recording meant that even moderately harder hits come across as louder than they actually were.
In my view, to my ears and eyes, Baker just seem quite emphatic in his physical movements, which can be a good thing (like with Cream!), or can be ... too much. We all have our own preferences, anyway.
He's also wearing a T-shirt. Shameful. Decorum in attire and manner must be maintained at all times.
Kidding aside, the guys he's playing with don't seem to mind; nor does the audience. Frisell in particular is smiling more than I remember seeing him do in any other live shows.
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Thanks to this thread, I looked around for comments from Frisell and Haden about their time playing with Baker. Found this (from this page), where Frisell talks about playing in that trio:
"But then, I swear to God, the first tune we start playing all together it just kicked in almost immediately and he just started smiling. There was so much joy in him feeling the three of us just playing in a room together. And it felt so true and so real. He was super generous with how we could play and what tunes we wanted to play whether it was one of mine or one of Charlie's or his own. It was just three guys getting together to play, and that really showed me where he was at. It was strictly about the music for him. It's what got him going.""
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I already said that I liked the music there, with Haden and Frisell, so I'm not surprised to hear Frisell say he enjoyed it. What I also said is that Baker does not exactly epitomize swing when he's playing. My comment about Baker's movement was not about the visual aesthetics of that, it was about how that translates into, affects, the feel of what's played.
Things can sound good even if they don't swing, obviously (Carlos Santana once commented that he couldn't swing from a rope, but he had that Latin groove in his bones). Just pointing out that facet of Baker's playing. He was very clearly a talented drummer.
