This appeared on my Facebook feed this morning:
Jack Bruce: The roots thing is very important to me. I think the difference between my roots and someone else's is that I didn't come from rock 'n' roll, I came from jazz, basically. I was playing with Ginger and Graham Bond, we were an alto–acoustic bass–drums trio, very much in the style of what Ornette Coleman was doing in the late '50s, Charlie Haden and so on. That is my roots.
Anyway, I left home at 17 and went down to audition for this band I'd heard about, because they were playing Maynard Ferguson, Dizzy Gillespie big-band arrangements. The audition piece was Dizzy's "One Bass Hit." It's a very difficult piece, so it was sorting out the men from the boys. And even though I was 17, I got the gig. A very good band.
That was my first thing playing interesting music, but it didn't last long because the punters, the dancers, found it a little bit far out, you know? In those days in the Mecca dancehalls there was a thing called the Jimmy Lally arrangements, just known as Lallys. This bloke came up with the idea of doing arrangements—Sid Philips, Simon's father, did the same thing—where you could play it on piano and it would sound fine, you could do piano, bass, and drums and it would sound OK, and whatever you added to it, right up to a full big-band, it would sound good.
But they were terribly boring arrangements of standards, and the bass parts were bom–bom–bom–bom. So I ended up getting fired because I couldn't go bom-bom-bom-bom. I kept sticking things in.
I travelled around the country playing with jazz bands—I played with Chet Baker, and then with a fairly good cocktail-jazz band on the American Air Force bases, which was great because it introduced me to Mingus. They had these great record collections, and I steeped myself in Mingus records. It completely changed my life, because that introduced me, though I didn't know it at the time, to the blues. Because really, what Mingus did was to bring country blues to jazz. Then I came to London and joined Alexis Korner.
Interview by Tony Bacon
Jack Bruce: The roots thing is very important to me. I think the difference between my roots and someone else's is that I didn't come from rock 'n' roll, I came from jazz, basically. I was playing with Ginger and Graham Bond, we were an alto–acoustic bass–drums trio, very much in the style of what Ornette Coleman was doing in the late '50s, Charlie Haden and so on. That is my roots.
Anyway, I left home at 17 and went down to audition for this band I'd heard about, because they were playing Maynard Ferguson, Dizzy Gillespie big-band arrangements. The audition piece was Dizzy's "One Bass Hit." It's a very difficult piece, so it was sorting out the men from the boys. And even though I was 17, I got the gig. A very good band.
That was my first thing playing interesting music, but it didn't last long because the punters, the dancers, found it a little bit far out, you know? In those days in the Mecca dancehalls there was a thing called the Jimmy Lally arrangements, just known as Lallys. This bloke came up with the idea of doing arrangements—Sid Philips, Simon's father, did the same thing—where you could play it on piano and it would sound fine, you could do piano, bass, and drums and it would sound OK, and whatever you added to it, right up to a full big-band, it would sound good.
But they were terribly boring arrangements of standards, and the bass parts were bom–bom–bom–bom. So I ended up getting fired because I couldn't go bom-bom-bom-bom. I kept sticking things in.
I travelled around the country playing with jazz bands—I played with Chet Baker, and then with a fairly good cocktail-jazz band on the American Air Force bases, which was great because it introduced me to Mingus. They had these great record collections, and I steeped myself in Mingus records. It completely changed my life, because that introduced me, though I didn't know it at the time, to the blues. Because really, what Mingus did was to bring country blues to jazz. Then I came to London and joined Alexis Korner.
Interview by Tony Bacon
