Jack Bruce
John Symon Asher Bruce was a Scottish musician. He gained popularity as the primary lead vocalist and bassist of rock band Cream. After the group disbanded in 1968, he pursued a solo career and also played with several bands.
In the early 1960s, Bruce joined the Graham Bond Organisation, where he met future Cream bandmate Ginger Baker. After leaving the band, he briefly joined John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, where he met Eric Clapton. In 1966, after a short time with Manfred Mann, he formed Cream with lead guitarist Clapton and drummer Baker. He co-wrote many of their songs with poet/lyricist Pete Brown.
After the group disbanded in the late 1960s, he began recording solo albums. Bruce put together a band of his own to perform material live and formed the blues rock band West, Bruce and Laing in 1972, with ex-Mountain guitarist Leslie West and drummer Corky Laing. His solo career spanned several decades. From the 1970s to the 1990s he played with several bands as a touring member. He reunited with Cream in 2005 for concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Bruce is considered one of the most important and influential bassists of all time. Rolling Stone magazine readers ranked him number eight on their list of "10 Greatest Bassists of All Time". He was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, both as a member of Cream.
Life and career
1943–1962: Early life
Bruce was born on 14 May 1943 in Bishopbriggs, Lanarkshire, Scotland, to Betty and Charlie Bruce, musical parents who moved frequently, resulting in the young Bruce attending 14 different schools, ending up at Bellahouston Academy. He began playing jazz bass in his teens and won a scholarship to study cello and musical composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama while playing in Jim McHarg's Scotsville Jazzband to support himself.1962–1966: Early career
Jack's playing in jazz combos was disapproved of by his school and he was forced to leave. After leaving school, he toured Italy, playing double bass with the Murray Campbell Big Band.In 1962, Bruce became a member of the London-based band Blues Incorporated, led by Alexis Korner, in which he played the upright bass. The band also included organist Graham Bond, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and drummer Ginger Baker. In 1963 the group broke up.
In March, 1963, Bruce played in the Johnny Burch Octet. Bruce would go on to form the Graham Bond Quartet with Bond, Baker and guitarist John McLaughlin. They played an eclectic range of music genres, including bebop, blues and rhythm and blues. As a result of session work, Bruce switched from the upright bass to the electric bass guitar. The move to electric bass happened as McLaughlin left the band. He was replaced by Heckstall-Smith on saxophone, and the band pursued a more concise R&B sound and changed their name to the Graham Bond Organisation. The group released two studio albums and several singles but were not commercially successful.
During the time that Bruce and Baker played with the Graham Bond Organisation, they were known for their hostility towards each other. There were numerous stories of the two sabotaging each other's equipment and fighting on stage. Relations grew so bad between the two that Bruce left the band in August 1965.
After leaving, Bruce recorded a solo single, "I'm Gettin Tired", for Polydor Records. He joined John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers band, which featured guitarist Eric Clapton. Bruce's stay in the band was brief, and he did not contribute to any releases at the time, but recordings featuring him were later released, initially on Looking Back and Primal Solos.
After the Bluesbreakers, Bruce had his first commercial success as a member of Manfred Mann in 1966, including "Pretty Flamingo", which reached number one in the UK singles chart as well as the freewheeling and groundbreaking jazz rock of Instrumental Asylum. When interviewed on the edition of the VH1 show Classic Albums which featured Disraeli Gears, Mayall said that Bruce had been lured away by the lucrative commercial success of Manfred Mann, while Mann himself recalled that Bruce played his first gig with the band without any rehearsal, playing the songs straight through without error, commenting that perhaps the chord changes seemed obvious to Bruce.
While with Manfred Mann, Bruce again collaborated with Clapton as a member of Powerhouse, which also featured Spencer Davis Group members Steve Winwood credited as "Steve Anglo", on vocals and Pete York on drums, Ben Palmer on piano, and Manfred Mann vocalist Paul Jones on harmonica. Three tracks were featured on the Elektra sampler album What's Shakin'. Two of the songs, "Crossroads" and "Steppin' Out", became staples in the live set of his next band, Cream.
1966–1968: Cream
In July 1966, Bruce, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker founded the power trio Cream, which gained international recognition playing blues-rock and jazz-inflected rock music. Bruce either penned or co-penned the majority of the band's tunes and sang most of the lead vocals, with Clapton backing him up and eventually assuming some leads himself.With his Gibson EB-3 or Fender VI electric basses, Bruce became one of the most famous bassists in rock, winning musicians' polls and influencing the next generation of bassists such as Sting, Jim Shaw, Geddy Lee, Geezer Butler and Jeff Berlin. Bruce co-wrote most of Cream's single releases with lyricist Pete Brown, including the hits "Sunshine of Your Love", "White Room" and "I Feel Free". Cream broke up in 1968.
1970s: Post-Cream
Collaborative efforts with musicians, in many genres – hard rock, jazz, blues, R&B, fusion, avant-garde, world music, third stream classical – continued as a theme of Bruce's career. Alongside these he produced a long line of highly regarded solo albums. In contrast to his collaborative works, the solo albums usually maintain a common theme: melodic songs with a complex musical structure, songs with lyrics frequently penned by Pete Brown and a core band of world-class musicians. This structure was loosened on his live solo albums and DVDs, where extended improvisations similar to those employed by Cream in live performance were sometimes still used.In August 1968, before Cream officially disbanded, Bruce recorded a semi-acoustic free jazz album with John McLaughlin, Dick Heckstall-Smith and Jon Hiseman. This was issued in 1970 as Bruce's second solo album, Things We Like. The album was a precursor to the jazz fusion boom in the early 1970s.
Bruce's first solo release, Songs for a Tailor, was issued in September 1969; it too featured Heckstall-Smith and Hiseman. It was a worldwide hit and also showcased Jack's ability as a gifted pianist, but after a brief supporting tour backed by Larry Coryell and Mitch Mitchell, Bruce joined the jazz fusion group Lifetime, with drummer Tony Williams, guitarist McLaughlin, and organist Larry Young, for its second album, Turn It Over. For the group's third album, Ego, Ron Carter replaced Bruce on bass, but Bruce contributed a guest vocal. Bruce then recorded his third solo album Harmony Row, but this was not as commercially successful as Songs for a Tailor. The song "The Consul at Sunset" from Harmony Row, which was inspired by the Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano, was released as a single in 1971, but did not chart.
In 1972 Bruce formed a blues rock power trio, West, Bruce & Laing. Besides Bruce, the group included singer/guitarist Leslie West and drummer Corky Laing, both formerly of the Cream-influenced American band Mountain. West, Bruce & Laing produced two studio albums, Why Dontcha and Whatever Turns You On, and one live album, Live 'n' Kickin'. Bruce also jammed with Syd Barrett at an informal jazz and poetry performance with Pete Brown in Cambridge in October 1973.
The band's breakup was announced shortly before Live 'n' Kickins release in early 1974, and Bruce released his fourth solo album Out of the Storm later that year. Also in 1974 he featured on the title track of Frank Zappa's album Apostrophe , recorded in November 1972. Bruce was credited with bass and co-authorship on the improvised track. When asked about Zappa in a 1992 interview, Bruce tried to change the subject and jokingly insisted that he had played only cello parts. Outtakes from the session were released on the archival release The Crux Of The Biscuit in 2016. In 1973 Bruce recorded bass guitar for Lou Reed's Berlin album, playing on all but two tracks.
A 1975 tour was lined up to support the Out of the Storm album with a band featuring former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor and jazz keyboard player Carla Bley, with whom he had collaborated in 1971 on Escalator over the Hill. The tour was belatedly documented on Live at Manchester Free Trade Hall '75, but it ended with Taylor's departure, and sessions for a studio album were abandoned. During the next year, Bruce only resurfaced to play on Charlie Mariano's Helen 12 Trees album.
In 1976, Bruce formed a new band with drummer Simon Phillips and keyboardist Tony Hymas. The group recorded an album, called How's Tricks. A world tour followed, but the album was a commercial failure. The follow-up album, Jet Set Jewel, was rejected at the time by Bruce's record label RSO as not being marketable, and RSO ultimately dropped Bruce from their roster. In 1979 he toured with members from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, reuniting him with John McLaughlin, and introducing him to drummer Billy Cobham. A 3-CD collection of his 1970s BBC recordings, entitled Spirit, was released in 2008.
In the late 1970s, Bruce also joined up to play with friends from his Alexis Korner days in Rocket 88, the back-to-the-roots band that Ian Stewart had arranged, and Bruce appears on the album of the same name, recorded live in Germany in 1979 and released in 1981. They also recorded a "live in the studio" album called Blues & Boogie Explosion for the German audiophile record label Jeton.