The focus is on jazz and Afrobeat … Ginger Baker at the Islington Academy. Photograph: Brigitte Engl/Redferns/Getty Images
"Everybody's on at me to play Toad," wheezes Ginger Baker, fielding yet another catcall for the maniacal five-minute drum solo from Cream's 1966 debut album that left every kit cowed and quaking. "But it's not on. I'm 75 and I'm a fucking cripple." It's the closest this one-off launch gig for Baker's crowdfunded anthology, A Drummer's Tale, gets to unleashing his notoriously cantankerous nature.
The 2012 documentary Beware of Mr Baker celebrated his spectacular – and spectacularly influential – skins skills, while indulging a tongue as barbed as a prison perimeter and rolling out rafts of ex-bandmates attesting to antisocial behaviour worthy of a minor-league despot. Tonight, however, the pleasure of performance, and his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, mellow him to a breathless but thankful huff.
Baker's too frail to reach the levels of frenzied intensity that gained him the reputation of greatest drummer ever. But, accompanied by bass and saxophone and flanked by mountainous sidekick Abass Dodoo on a comically toytown percussion set, he presides over the shifting jazz signatures of Wayne Shorter's Footprints with flair, authority and a stoic grimace.
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