Jack Bruce, Former Cream Frontman is the headline of a small NY Times piece. Jack Bruce, who formed influential British rock band Cream in the 1960s with guitarist Eric Clapton, has died aged 71, his family said on Saturday. Bruce co-wrote some of Cream's biggest hits including "Sunshine of Your Love" and "I Feel Free" before the band broke up after only two years in 1968. Bruce, who was born in Glasgow, began playing bass as a teenager and dropped out of music school because he was not allowed to play jazz.
Jack Bruce, former Cream man is the headline in the obit in the Guardian. Bruce played bass, sang and was the principal songwriter in Cream, but even leaving aside that group, in which he played with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, his CV reads like a comprehensive guide to the British blues boom, with spells in Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc, the Graham Bond Organisation, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Manfred Mann.
Embedded, it has video of Cream playing White Room live in 1968. That led me to finding a film made about the end of the group in 1968.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was considered the spiritual father of the Jewish Renewal movement — an influential camp of religious pioneers who reintroduced to synagogue services ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer — died Thursday at his home in Boulder, Colo. He was 89.
His death was announced byAleph, an umbrella organization that represents about 40 Jewish Renewal congregations around the world, most of them in North America.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, left, and Ram Dass in 2008.Credit
Joan Halifax/Upaya Zen Center What joy they exude.
Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi’s strain of Judaism had its roots in Chabad-Lubavitch, a branch of Hasidism that itself began as a revival movement in 18th-century Russia, drawing ideas from mystical Judaic texts like the kabbalah. But he traced the spark for his renewal movement to the intellectual and spiritual ferment he encountered on American college campuses in the 1960s.
As an ordained rabbi of the Lubavitch movement, which sends emissaries around the world to keep the Jewish faith alive, he was dispatched to meet with secularized Jewish students throughout the Northeast. Along the way, he befriended fellow spiritual seekers like the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton and Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), an educator and proponent of hallucinogens and Hinduism.
His exposure to Eastern religion, medieval Christian mysticism and LSD — he had the first of a handful of hallucinogenic experiences in 1962, under Leary’s tutelage — helped him formulate some of the innovations he brought to contemporary Jewish practice.
From his LSD experience in particular he concluded that “what I’d experienced in prayer and meditation before — the oneness and connection with God — was true, but it wasn’t just Jewish,” he told the writer Sara Davidson, author of“The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery,”a book, published this year, about her conversations with Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi on aging and mortality.
