Jack Bruce Smiles & Grins: Broadcast Sessions 1970–2001 [Esoteric Recordings] https://open.spotify.com/album/35CbsE8bFw4ZvxSetju8H2 When I interviewed Jack Bruce for Bass Player in 1993, he summed up the path of his career by saying, “It’s nice not knowing what’s going to come next.” That unpredictability had carried him from early jazz gigs on upright to sideman work on electric before playing in Cream made him a star — and then onward to a lengthy career that eventually produced 22 solo albums, a half-dozen compilations, and more than 50 collaborative recordings before his death in 2014. Now there’s another Jack Bruce album, released earlier this year on Esoteric Recordings: Smiles & Grins: Broadcast Sessions 1970–2001, a box set that brings together all of his surviving BBC radio and television appearances, plus a session recorded for German TV with the short-lived but legendary band Lifetime, led by drummer Tony Williams. There are six discs in all: four audio CDs and two Blu-Ray video discs, as well as an illustrated booklet with extensive notes by English music journalist Sid Smith. (It’s worth noting that all but three of the tracks on the audio discs were in a box set called Spirit, released on Polydor in 2008.) This extensive set presents a great overview of Jack Bruce’s multiple talents: singer, songwriter, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and (especially) bass player. There’s a lot to take in, some of it forgettable but much of it exciting in the way that only strong live music, captured in the moment, can be. The production quality is quite good, given the varied sources, and there are some droll moments provided by the BBC announcers. The bulk of the music comes from the ’70s, and that’s a good thing — that era, I think, represented a creative peak for Jack Bruce as both a songwriter and performer. Disc 1 is from an August 1971 BBC Radio One concert and leans heavily on Jack’s newest solo album at the time, Harmony Row. The band includes guitarist Chris Spedding, drummer John Marshall, and keyboard player Graham Bond, with whom Jack had a long association (and with whom he had once been a sideman). Jack’s bass, still the Gibson EB-3, has a raw, distorted edge that dominates the mix — and his voice is strong. The highlight here is “A Letter of Thanks,” the quirky blues with the Pete Brown lyric that Jeff Berlin says “makes me laugh to this day”: “I trace your name in spinach.” The set includes a simmering version of Cream’s “We’re Going Wrong” and culminates with an 18-minute workout on “Powerhouse Sod” that’s very much in the spirit of a Cream jam. After shouts of “more, more” from the audience, the band wraps up with an up-tempo 12-bar, “You Sure Look Good to Me,” with Graham Bond singing. All in all, it’s a terrific set featuring lots of energetic interplay on some of Jack’s best tunes. Th