The bassist Jack Bruce always wanted to match: “Changed the direction of my thinking”
Jack Bruce is more than a rock bassist; he was responsible for playing in a way that brought multiple genres together.
We take it for granted in the modern age, given we live in a time when genre has never mattered less. With the accessibility of music, artists are happy to chuck a load of different styles at a wall and see what sticks, but this wasn’t so much the norm in the 1960s. There were only a few bands who were blending different styles of music, and one of them was Cream.
They had a sound which centred around rock ‘n’ roll, but there was more to it than that. They incorporated different blends of jazz and blues in order to make a variation of rock, which sowed the seeds for prog and more complicated variations on the genre. You’ll struggle to find an innovative artist who hasn’t been inspired by the sound of Cream at some point in their lives.
Ian Anderson, the brain behind Jethro Tull, has previously spoken about the influence of Cream on the world of prog. While it’s hard to properly pinpoint where prog rock started because of its loose parameters, the Tull frontman believes Jack Bruce and the other members of Cream certainly had something to do with it.
“A more progressive approach, which had been the latter part of ’66, listening to people like Graham Bond, who had at that point in his band Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Baker on drums. In many ways, Graham Bond was kind of a precursor of that thing that became progressive rock,” he said. “And, of course, Cream in its way when those two guys left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist.”
Geddy Lee of Rush fame had a similar mindset, as he felt that it was Cream who showed him how limitless music could be. Rush were so inspired by the early iteration of prog rockers that a lot of their first gigs as a band were spent predominantly playing covers of them. If not for bassists like Jack Bruce, bands such as Rush may well not exist.
“[Cream] was far and away my favourite band when I got old enough to appreciate rock music, and I was getting more and more into rock,” said Lee. “Cream was such an influence on early Rush and me as a bass player.”
Whether he knew it or not, Jack Bruce was always destined to be a huge influence in the world of innovative music, as from an early age, he was listening to completely different genres of music and loving every single one. By growing up on a blend of rock, jazz and the blues, it was only a matter of time before he tried to combine these various sounds by emulating his heroes. Out of those inspirations, there was one artist he truly adored and who he made his new standard when it came to playing the bass.
“I first became aware of Mingus when I worked on an American air force base in Italy when I was about 18,” he recalled. “Once a week, there was a jazz evening when people would play records.”
Concluding, “They had an amazing record library, and me being a bass player, one of the guys said, ‘You got to hear this.’ There it was, Charles Mingus. That changed the direction of my thinking, because he became the person that I wanted to emulate.”
