How to play bass like Cream’s Jack Bruce
If there was anything that Jack Bruce did, it was play loud. For decades, bass players weren’t at the forefront of music. They were sidemen, session players, and background figures, even in genres that were sympathetic to them like R&B, gospel, and jazz. Amplifiers weren’t loud enough to properly project their playing, and bass players were rarely band leaders. But as rock music began pushing the boundaries of live performance and band makeup, other genre players began to embrace the possibilities of plugging in and being heard. That’s how Bruce went from a jazz nut to a blues purist to a rock and roll god.
Bruce’s volume wasn’t just about power (at least not at first). It was practical: as one of only three musicians onstage with Cream, Bruce needed to fill out the space left open by his bandmates, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. The band just happened to come up during a time when artists like The Who and Jimi Hendrix were demanding louder and louder equipment. Bruce’s status as the band’s frontman meant that he wasn’t going to be shy when it came to being heard. His volume battles (and physical skirmishes) with Baker were legendary, but they hid some astounding technique and wonderful subtlety that couldn’t come through maxed-out Marshall stacks.
Bruce’s approach to the bass started with classical techniques he learned as a young cello prodigy. Bruce’s preferences for fretless instruments come from his cello, and later his upright bass, playing. The double bass proved to be his most useful asset, opening up worlds beyond classical compositions. More specifically, the upright bass allowed Bruce to play in his preferred genre: jazz. His teenage years were spent indulging in Fats Waller, along with the traditional Scottish folk songs that his mother taught him. His unique blend of influences helped Bruce find his way through a diverse array of styles.
In the early 1960s, blues began to take over in Britain. Influenced by the Chicago and Mississippi masters of the genre, Bruce joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, where he had his first fateful encounter with lifelong collaborator/sparing partner Peter ‘Ginger’ Baker. Blues gave Bruce an appreciation for simplicity, something that he embraced when creating his own riffs. He then went on to rejoin Baker in the Graham Bond Organisation before jumping ship to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, where he met Eric Clapton.
When Bruce, Baker, and Clapton decided to form their own group, Bruce was tagged as the band’s lead singer. The ethos behind Cream was that all three members would be given full autonomy when it came to playing and performing. For the first time in his life, Bruce was given free rein to find his own identity. He stumbled onto a style that was riff-heavy, fluid, expressive, and bolder than any bass player before he had been. With an arsenal of amps and a full lifetime’s worth of musical knowledge, Bruce was a formidable player in the emerging genre of hard rock.
Bruce’s switch from jazz to blues and then rock meant that he had to abandon his preferred fretless acoustic instruments in favour of fretted electric guitars. Going opposite from bulky uprights, Bruce preferred short-scale electric basses like the Gibson EB-3 and the Fender Bass VI. The EB-3 would be Bruce’s main instrument during his time in Cream, and when plugged into his stack of Marshall 4x12s cabinets with Marshall 100 heads, Bruce could blast a sonic hole in just about any live setting that Cream found themselves in. But by the 1970s, new advances allowed Bruce to return to his roots on fretless instruments. His main squeeze would be the custom Warwick fretless bass, which Bruce would use from 1976 all the way up to his death in 2014.
Bruce’s approach to playing was varied. So much so that he rarely ever played a song the same way twice. Even songs with distinctive basslines, like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ or ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, were often embellished by Bruce in live settings. Thanks to his roots in jazz, Bruce’s knowledge of inversions was unmatched, and you could often hear him angling jams and chord progressions away from the root notes where most bass players were expected to stay. Bruce was also keen on exploring the upper parts of the bass, playing higher octaves and fills that would push him up the bass neck.
Another key to Bruce’s style was his embrace of chromaticism. Songs like ‘White Room’ and ‘We’re Going Wrong’ found Bruce completely at ease navigating through chromatic chord changes and close harmonies. But the simplicity of the band’s blues rock roots kept Bruce from ever getting too flashy: while Clapton and Baker were busy taking solos, Bruce was often smart enough to keep his lines comparatively stripped back. But Bruce also played according to his mood: when pushed and prodded by Baker, Bruce would often play more aggressively and intricately, battling his rhythm section partner for sonic supremacy.
These battles fueled the excitement that made Cream unique, but it also would cause the end of the band. By their final concerts together, Bruce and Baker were playing over each other on purpose, soloing endlessly and rarely listening to each other. Whether it was born from their long-standing rivalry, egos, or over-exuberance in pursuing the loudest equipment available, Cream were a hot and loud mess by 1968. With all three members burnt out and at each other’s throats, Cream disbanded, putting an end to Bruce’s most well-known project.
But he never stopped playing. In fact, some of Bruce’s most exciting and impressive bass parts came outside of Cream. At the top of the list is his extended bass solo on Frank Zappa’s ‘Apostrophe (‘)’. Even though Bruce later claimed it wasn’t him playing bass on the track, the fluid bass part is unmistakably him. Zappa found Bruce’s expressive style difficult to control and perfectly described his approach while talking to Guitar Player in 1977. “I found it very difficult to play with him; he’s too busy,” Zappa claimed. “He doesn’t really want to play the bass in terms of root functions; I think he has other things on his mind.”
The only problem is that Bruce isn’t too busy: he’s just impossible to control. Thanks to his out-front style and deep knowledge of musical forms, Bruce was able to make his way up and down the neck of his bass. Along the way, he filled in the spaces that other bass players left open. Playing “lead bass” wasn’t born from Jack Bruce, but few players exemplified the approach quite like Bruce.
