Cream bassist Jack Bruce dies at 71

JACK BRUCE, THE Scottish bassist and singer best known for his work with 1960s hard rock pioneers Cream, died on Saturday at his home in Suffolk, England.

By (Reuters)

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Published: Mon 27 Oct 2014, 5:48 PM

Last updated: Fri 3 Apr 2015, 8:31 PM

He was 71. Bruce’s death was announced by his family on his official website. No cause of death was cited. Though he maintained substantial renown within musical circles both before and after his stint with Cream, the band’s four-album run was nonetheless the commercial high point of Bruce’s career. A supergroup composed of Bruce, Eric Clapton on guitar and Ginger Baker on drums, the band played a pivotal role in the development of hard rock and heavy metal.

Featuring Bruce on lead vocals, the band’s originals like Sunshine of Your Love, White Room and I Feel Free would quickly become standards, and the group’s third album, Wheels of Fire, was the first double-LP to go platinum. Cream was burdened by interpersonal combustion almost from the start, and the band broke up after a farewell tour in 1968; a fourth album, appropriately titled Goodbye, was released in 1969.

Cream reunited in 1993 in honour of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then again in 2005 for a series of concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The three musicians, frustrated by the creative limitations of their existing gigs, formed Cream in 1966 and released debut Fresh Cream later that year. The album charted in the U.K., but it was the 1967 follow-up Disraeli Gears that launched them in the U.S., reaching No. 4. As a bassist, Bruce favored deceptively simple, effortlessly flowing lines that could explode into dizzying flurries at a moment’s notice.

Though Clapton’s guitar heroics drew most of the attention, Bruce’s work in Cream played an essential role in elevating the role of the bass guitar in rock music, and it isn’t hard to see his influence on the likes of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and Rush’s Geddy Lee. As a singer, his slinky falsetto has been mimicked by a number of descendants, with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age perhaps the most prominent modern-day practitioner.