One thing I loved about Jack is that he would get over himself. He could be prickly, but he was also very mischievous. He responded to what was happening in the moment he wasn’t handcuffed by the past. Losing him felt very personal, because a lot of the legendary guys, it’s almost as if there’s no actual person left, there’s only the legend. He was interested in what I was doing, what I was talking about, and that was a challenge on one hand but it was also inspiring and affirmative. When I recorded and toured with him, he didn’t want me to play like Clapton or Hendrix or Robin Trower. He was saying that there is a way to live with all your contradictions and all your impulses. It was one of those moments of clear truth. I was saying, “You played with Jimi Hendrix, and Tony Williams, and Carla Bley…” And he said, “Vernon, we live so many lives in the life we have.” And it just hit me. He turned me on to all of that, and I heard Lifetime, and that’s when I got a sense that Jack was this journeyman, this real risk-taker of a musician. ![]() He started talking to me about Songs for a Tailor and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill. ![]() ![]() Later, my friend Reggie Sylvester, a drummer in the jazz workshop at my high school in Brooklyn, he was a huge fan of Jack Bruce. It was built on what had come before but it was much more freewheeling, the structures were looser. Some of my earliest memories of rock music were hearing Cream on the radio, and I knew that there was something fundamentally different happening in that music. Spectrum Road (from left): John Medeski, Cindy Blackman-Santana, Vernon Reid and Jack Bruce (photo: Jimmy & Dena Katz)
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