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(Credits: Alamy)<\/p>\n
Thu 6 November 2025 17:00, UK <\/p>\n
Most people working with Ginger Baker<\/a> knew what they were getting into. <\/p>\n He may have been one of the greatest drummers to walk the Earth, but when looking at the tension-fuelled fights that went on between him and Jack Bruce half the time, it wasn\u2019t like he was exactly the easiest person to get along with all the time. But whereas Eric Clapton could be the peacemaker in Cream some of the time, Baker knew when he was dealing with a musician who didn\u2019t know what they were doing.<\/p>\n Granted, it was going to take an insanely high track record to be able to match what Baker was doing. He liked the idea of making music that had a certain flow to it, but he was also quick to say that some of the greatest drummers of his generation, like John Bonham, weren\u2019t nearly as good as the rest of the world claimed them to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s because Baker didn\u2019t go to the school of rock and roll drumming. His heroes were all jazz musicians, and while that gave him a kinship with people like Charlie Watts whenever he saw him play with The Rolling Stones, it didn\u2019t exactly endear him to bands that claimed to only play rock and roll.<\/p>\n Because if there\u2019s one thing that jazz players know better than anyone, it\u2019s the ability to improvise. The song isn\u2019t supposed to have one set form from one bar to the next, and the beauty of seeing Cream in their prime was not knowing where the song was going to go whenever they started to jam together. So when Baker got back together with Bruce decades later, it felt like they were bound to recapture the magic all over again. All they needed was the right guitarist, but Gary Moore was far from the best choice in Baker\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n Then again, it\u2019s not like Moore was a hack by any means. He had been celebrated as one of the finest blues guitarists of his time, and listening to his solo work, it\u2019s not like he didn\u2019t have the chops to fill Clapton\u2019s shoes if he wanted to. But when he got together with the rest of the band, the hardest hurdle for Baker to get over was knowing that he couldn\u2019t improvise to save his life.<\/p>\n For him, the beauty of playing live was getting the chance to stretch out, and Baker knew he was dealing with someone who refused to get themselves out of first gear, saying<\/a>, \u201cMore gigs were cancelled than played. And they were awful anyway. Unlike Cream, everything with Gary Moore was contrived. Every solo he played was the same. I like to improvise.\u201d And if you want to see what Baker was talking about, you only need to look at Cream\u2019s farewell gigs.<\/p>\n