CREAM WERE NOT JAZZ PLAYERS, BUT THEY JAM THE CRAP OUT OF TWO CHORDS

 

Tonight I was too hot and bored with the what the streaming services had online, a situation that often gives me a hankering for something loud ,distorted, tones that are full expressions of violently playful impulses. Do I have issues? Likely. But I am putting this version up because someone had to; what I like here isn't how much Cream replicates bluesor achieves some nuanced suggestion of emotion, but rather how these instrumentalists--a blues guitarist with no jazz technique whatsoever and two jazz musicians constantly battling it out for who play the busiest business in a live set--but rather how far they were able to stretch this two-chord song into a sixteen improvisation that is, on its own terms, brilliant.

It's about sound, interweaving of guitar, bass and drums, picking up rhythmic cues and tempo changes, at times leaving all resemblance of the song behind and achieving a sort of heaven of pentatonic riffing. Some find this repetitive, and so be it; it's my kind of repetition, like Fillmore Live Miles Davis. Alive, raw, exploratory, nasty, brutal and extended. Jack Bruce and Ginger, bass and drums of Cream, had fairly extensive jazz experience and , as it goes, had a better variety of improvisational approaches to extensive jamming than did Clapton, who was and remains a stylish blues guitarist with limited vocabulary. Bruce has said that he and Baker wanted Clapton to be their Ornette Coleman, and to say the least they challenged the guitarist to rise to the occasion by playing the tunes anywhich way but loose. Clapton never soared magically into jazzy excursions, but what's exciting is to listen to him push his style to the limits.

His playing was never as sharp, blazing or responsive to ideas being thrown at him since Cream broke up. Listening to these searing phrases, repetitive as they are against the rhythm riot perpetrated by Bruce and Baker, makes my senses dance. My issues, so called, are sweetly asleep for the night.