I Can See You - by Paddy Summerfield c. 1986
Showing posts with label Ginger Baker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ginger Baker. Show all posts

Thursday, April 25, 2024

Ginger on Cream! | Don’s Tunes




Of playing with Cream, Ginger Baker once said: "It was as if something else had taken over. You're not conscious of playing.


"You're listening to this fantastic sound that you're a part of. And your part is just… happening. It was a gift, and we three had it in abundance."


Jimmy’s Page a good player. I don’t think Led Zeppelin filled the void that Cream left, but they made a lot of money. I probably like about 5% of what they did - a couple of things were really cool. What I don’t like is the heavy bish-bash, jing-bap, jing-bash bullshit.


Credit: Bill Wood/Rex Features

Leda Baker and her dad, Ginger, Harrow UK


Don's Tunes

Sunday, October 09, 2022

Remembering Ginger Baker (19 August 1939 – 6 October 2019)

Cream, 1968: Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker - WireImage



“He was so unique and had such a distinctive personality,” Stewart Copeland of the Police said in 2013. “Nobody else followed in his footsteps. Everybody tried to be John Bonham and copy his licks, but it’s rare that you hear anybody doing the Ginger Baker thing.”


Ralph Salmins: “Ginger had the magic ingredient that makes a drummer truly great: something very hard to quantify. Sheer wildness and mad abandon combined with eccentricity made him an incredibly exciting musician behind the drums and he was someone who could truly set a group on fire. Ginger’s deep love and connection with African music gave him the ability to cross stylistic boundaries and unite musicians in the worlds of jazz and rock.”


“I used to be mean – I’d deliberately mess up recording sessions with my temper and go mad at the slightest thing. Then one day some friends took me to one side and pointed out that it might be wiser if I calmed down. I respected them enough to listen – and not throw anything.” Ginger Baker


Ginger Baker:  


“Oh for god’s sake, I’ve never played rock. Cream was two jazz players and a blues guitarist playing improvised music. We never played the same thing two nights running… It was jazz.”


 

 

Sunday, October 06, 2019

GINGER BAKER

GINGER BAKER R.I.P. 1939 - 2019



“If he’d been born earlier, he’d have been a pirate.” 
– Jay Bulger (director of ‘Beware of Mr. Baker’) whose nose Ginger broke during the filming





Ginger Baker, one of the most innovative and influential drummers in rock music, has died on October 6, 2019 at the age of 80. In September 2019, the family of Ginger Baker announced that he was critically ill and asked to keep him in their prayers. A co-founder of Cream, he also played with Blind Faith, Hawkwind and Fela Kuti in a long and varied career. His style combined the lyricism of jazz with the crude power of rock. One critic said watching him was like witnessing “a human combine harvester”. Nicknamed Ginger for his flaming red hair, he was also a temperamental and argumentative figure, whose behaviour frequently led to on-stage punch-ups.
One of rock’s first “supergroups”, Cream (together with Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton) fused blues and psychedelia to dazzling effect on songs like Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love, Badge and I Feel Free. They sold more than 35 million albums and were awarded the world’s first ever platinum disc for their LP Wheels of Fire. Along with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the band expanded the vocabulary of heavy rock, especially during their incendiary live shows, where the three musicians would stretch simple riffs into long, exploratory improvisations. - BBC













It has always struck me that it was Ginger's humour that produced this Victorian Music Hall joke song . . . . . .I knew it word perfect and sang it in dedication to Ginger throughout my teenage years, mostly hanging about with the now legendary drummer himself, Johnny Marter with whom I would wander the village singing and playing guitar til our fingers bled! He became, as well as having been one of my dearest friends, one of the best natural drummers it has ever been my privilege to know. He could follow and match Ginger without difficulty. 



and 37 years later . . . . . . . 









TOAD - Ladies and Gentlemen
MR GINGER BAKER 


GOODNIGHT MR BAKER . . . . 



I was here,  a spit away from the stage . . . . . 

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

NEWS JUST IN . . . . 

mostly (well alright solely) from Big O . . . . .

IGGY POP NUDE FOR ART CLASS

It's already a big deal to have a celebrity in class but what happens when it is Iggy Pop, 68, who poses nude for your art class? Twenty-one artists, aged 19 to 80, at the New York Academy of Art were greeted by a naked Iggy Pop on February 21, 2016 as the rocker was recruited by the Brooklyn Museum to serve as the class' nude model. Rolling Stone reported that conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, who was the driving force behind the Iggy Pop Life Class project, said: "For me it makes perfect sense for Iggy Pop to be the subject of a life class; his body is central to an understanding of rock music and its place within American culture. His body has witnessed much and should be documented."
Wow he'd be great too. I would love to draw Iggy!

SAD NEWS

BAKER CALLS IT QUITS

Ginger Baker has cancelled all of his upcoming tour dates. Rolling Stone reports that Baker broke the news on his blog writing, "Just seen doctor... big shock... no more gigs for this old drummer... everything is off... of all things I never thought it would be my heart..." Additionally, Baker's Facebook page reports: "To all fans; it is with great sadness that we announce the cancellation of all shows. Ginger's doctors have insisted that he have complete rest due to diagnosis of serious heart problems. We hope you will all join with his family in wishing him well. God bless Ginger Baker."





RESPECTFULLY YOURS . . .


RE-WIRED
Wire have announced they'll release a mini-album entitled Nocturnal Koreans on April 22 with material left over from recording sessions from their 2015 self-titled record. The eight-track is due out via Pinkflag. Vocalist and guitarist Colin Newman says: "The Wire album was quite respectful of the band and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful. More accurately, it's the band being less respectful to itself - in that it's more created in the studio rather than recorded as the band played it, which was mostly the case with Wire. A general rule for this record was, any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better." Wire as pragmatic performers.

ENO HAS THE SHIP

Brian Eno has new album, The Ship (Warp Records), due April 29. It features a cover of The Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free", from their self-titled third album, and a poem read by Peter Serafinowicz. Here's a bit of what Eno describes as his inspiration:

"One of the starting points was my fascination with the First World War, that extraordinary trans-cultural madness that arose out of a clash of hubris between empires. It followed immediately after the sinking of the Titanic, which to me is its analogue. The Titanic was the Unsinkable Ship, the apex of human technical power, set to be Man's greatest triumph over nature. The First World War was the war of materiel, 'over by Christmas', set to be the triumph of Will and Steel over humanity. The catastrophic failure of each set the stage for a century of dramatic experiments with the relationships between humans and the worlds they make for themselves.

"I was thinking of those vast Belgian fields where the First World War was agonisingly ground out; and the vast deep ocean where the Titanic sank; and how little difference all that human hope and disappointment made to it. They persist and we pass in a cloud of chatter."

It is worth noting here that Brian Eno was the first person to publish on disc Gavin Bryars' 'Sinking Of The Titanic' on his Discreet label

OCCASIONALLY Big O posts comments . . . . 
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HEADROOM(Why we like to hear from you)
THE GLEN HANSARD COMMITMENT
Followed Glen Hansard since The Commitments film days and, more recently, of the wonderful film Once in 2007 with the hauntingly voiced Market Irglová. I had been out of the loop so hadn't heard Didn't He Ramble last year and, on the strength of this, better go out straight away and buy it! (See powers that be that's how it oughta be! That's what bootlegs or ROIOs are for!)
swappersvia internet
REPLY: Click here to download Glen Hansard in Munich 2015.