purchase [Wheels of Fire]
I confess that I have never given much attention to the bass player. Yeah, I know that the bass and drums are critical to the ryhthm, but the paucity of notes that the bass plays belies the importance of a song's underlying structure.
A Quora post I read recently asked "why can't you ever hear the bass?" While the question strikes me as a bit "out of it", I fear that there is some truth to the question: the bass (player) rarely gets the spotlight. And I confess it wasn't until I started digging this week, that I paid much attention to Jack Bruce.
Musically trained as a cello player and then moving to the standing bass, Bruce moved through various groups, including time with John McLaughlin and Ginger Baker in the Graham Bond Quartet, and with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton.
Although I owned a copy of Cream's double album Wheels of Fire as well as one of Fresh Cream, neither, particularly in comparison with Disraeli Gears did much for me. Although we generally think of Cream as a trio (Clapton, Bruce, Baker), a majority of Wheels of Fire is a quartet, with Felix Pappalardi as the fourth member (later to head off and help found Mountain with Leslie West - with whom Bruce later founded West, Bruce & Laing)
Jack Bruce, of course, is the bass player of the original trio, but he also did a lot of the lead vocals as well as writing quite a few of the songs. He was a multi-intrumentalist and you can find videos of him playing the piano and more. On Wheels of Fire, we get Bruce and Pappalardi playing cellos, violas, bass ... but I bet you wouldn't know it unless you read the credits/liner notes. Pappalardi is playing the viola in "White Room" up top. Here, in "Passing the Time", Bruce is credited with playing the viola.
At one point in his early career, we find him playing with Charlie Watts, among others at the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club.
