Could this be Ginger Baker’s best-ever drum solo?
Ginger Baker is wildly considered to be one of the best drummers to ever get behind the kit and let loose. He was a central part of Cream, and his reputation on the skins gave him the importance of being the first drummer to achieve superstar status.
Describing his seeming destiny to be a drummer, Baker once wrote in a memoir: “After sitting in with a band at a party, I’d never sat on a kit before (the kids virtually forced me to play), I discovered that I could play the drums just like that… I heard two of the horn players remark, ‘Christ! we’ve got a drummer!’ that was it… a light went on… I was a drummer.”
Baker’s style was comprised of a wild technique employed during several lengthy and complex drum solos when Cream played live. He was unpredictable and flamboyant, both behind the kit and out in the open too. However, Baker himself, despite his excessive playing style, always considered himself something of a jazz drummer.
He loved Duke Ellington and recalled seeing the jazz legend and adopting – like Keith Moon – a double bass drum after seeing Ellington’s drummer performing with one. Baker was also capable of performing in a restrained style, as Dave Grohl would during Nirvana’s 1994 MTV Unplugged session.
Baker said: “Every drummer that ever played for Duke Ellington played a double bass drum kit. I went to a Duke Ellington concert in 1966, and Sam Woodyard was playing with Duke, and he played some incredible tom-tom and two bass drum things, some of which I still use today, and I just knew I had to get a two bass drum kit.”
He added: “Keith Moon was with me at that concert, and we were discussing it, and he went straight round to Premier and bought two kits which he stuck together. I had to wait for Ludwig to make a kit up for me, which they did — to my own specifications.”
In Cream’s farewell performance in 1968, Baker played a wild and extensive drum solo that went on for nearly ten minutes. It proves that the Lewisham-born musician was one of the best, and it was his playing, and over-the-top style made Cream such a highly respected outfit in the 1960s.
Despite a highly-cantankerous attitude that alienated interviewers, band members, friends and family, Baker remains missed in the music world since his death in 2019. Check out the wild drum solo from the Cream farewell concert in 1968 below.
