This is an odd one for today: an attempted look at a Ginger Baker drum solo, on the tune “Wade In The Water,” with Graham Bond, 1963. This is part transcription, part rant & rave, and part 1000-word raised eyebrow.
I found out about this recording from Todd Bishop, who found it on a Reddit thread asking for some analysis of Ginger’s playing. Todd is not a big fan of Ginger Baker and left a comment:
I mean — he’s flailing. The band’s time is raggedy, and so is his. There’s normal stuff in there, but he’s not really keeping it together, so he’s bashing his way through. Which you have to do sometimes, to me this is very rough.
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t go over well. It sounds a bit flippant, and maybe it is, but I really don’t think it’s any more flippant than the other replies; someone described it as being some sort of 12/8–4/4 polymeter, while someone else claimed it was a “standard 3 over 4 modulation,” which was explained as both a polymeter and one of those implied metric modulations drummers obsess over. I’m sure these two commenters are trying their best to be helpful, but neither is a particularly succinct way to break down Ginger’s playing.
Hearing the solo, I couldn’t quite nail down what Ginger was doing; I treat some of these transcriptions as puzzles of sorts, so, what the hell, I gave notating this a shot. I certainly can’t explain it with a few dozen words.
I didn’t know anything about Graham Bond until Todd wrote about him, and this album is a lengthy compilation mainly focused on BBC radio gigs. Disc 1 has “Wade In The Water” along with the rest of the related show, which is an odd program indeed — a lot of the tunes are not traditional standards, judging by their exclusion from the famous bootleg fake books of the 20th century. The gig also has Jack Bruce from Cream and John McLaughlin of Mahavishnu Orchestra.
The drum feature starts at 3:15, and the first five bars are easy enough to process, but the time is indeed loose, especially that quarter note triplet in bar 3. Beat 3 of bar 5 kicks off a dotted 8th note pattern that’s easy to understand on paper, but not so easy to hear as such. It took me some time to recognize it — initially, it sounded like triplets but at a much faster tempo. However, as 16th notes, things actually slow down a bit, by five clicks or so. Not really worth notating, but it’s part of the reason why it sounds off. It’s almost somewhere in between 16th notes and 8th notes septuplets.
Before you ask, no, you can’t count it with septuplets, as the phrasing doesn’t work. Also… it’s Ginger Baker; he’s not using polymetric septuplet phrasing.
The bars of 5/4 and 9/16 look a bit screwy, and I’m fairly certain Ginger lost the pocket and started playing 16ths before cueing the band for an ensemble thing after finding the beat. Or, after finding a beat, I should say. There’s a more obvious tempo change at this point, and just at the threshold of what I bother marking in a score.
After cueing the band, we get something like a shout chorus, which is much more straightforward (marked by the double barlines):
The finale isn’t too gnarly, and there’s another polymeter thing, this time with dotted quarter notes and some interesting 16th notes:
And that’s that. Well… Ginger kinda whiffs the downbeat of the band entrance. But that’s that. Bob’s your uncle as Ginger would say. Maybe.
So then, is it flailing? Maybe… the time is loose, and some beats go missing, which are things we generally try to avoid as drummers. But hey, a lot of us have been there — having some leeway with the tempo so our vocabulary works more to our satisfaction before we go fishing for a downbeat. 172 (or thereabouts) is a tough swing tempo for playing flashy, and I don’t know what the plans for this session were, so it’s possible it was never really meant for posterity.
I won’t deny that there’s something funny about this whole thing, and not ha-ha funny. The solo, my transcription, the discussion… again, it’s easy enough to see the score and pick up on the ideas, but it has an odd quality.
Perhaps Todd’s analysis wasn’t helpful, but honestly, that buzzword-style of music theory is worse, I think. I’m getting flashbacks to “Story” and those comments about the ending halftime shuffle being a polyrhythmic hemiola thingamajig. The polymetric stuff from “Wade In The Water” is definitely the most cogent part of the solo, but it makes up about a quarter of the drum feature. Please don’t throw out words like modulation as a concise way of describing interesting, evolving syncopations.
It’s also probably not a good idea to name-drop Elvin Jones, who, famously, did not dig Ginger’s playing. In response to some Blind Faith: “Nothing happenin’. Cat’s got delusions of grandeur with no grounds. They should make him an astronaut and lose his ass!”
By going into the lion’s den like that, Todd is certainly a braver man than I am. This thread is one of the reasons why I haven’t said much on Reddit recently, and I’m having a tougher and tougher time finding discussions I want to participate in. I really connected with Todd when he said that he finds himself “disagreeing with a lot of things said online, about this instrument, and about music.”
I went on a bit of a Cream kick last year, and Ginger Baker’s playing with Cream is fine. He has a certain swagger that’s easy to identify, but he has never been a huge source of inspiration for me. He definitely made some unique choices, for better or worse — I know “Sunshine of Your Love” is a hit, but I never liked Ginger’s 1 & 3 tom backbeat under such a punchy guitar riff.
While classic rock is not in heavy rotation for me these days, John Bonham has always had a big influence on me, and I imagine that I will enjoy Live at Leeds for many years to come. It’s unfortunate that Ginger had an ego that was insanely disproportionate to his talent and legacy:
I do have a God-given gift that only a few drummers have — and it is a gift, it’s not something you can work at. Keith Moon? John Bonham? No, I wouldn’t put them in the same frame. They were drummers, but they weren’t in any way exceptional in my opinion.
To add insult to injury, Elvin did approve of Keith Moon in the very same interview. Oh well.
