Blue Notes: by Robin Lynam

A special corner of hell may be waiting for Ginger Baker for inventing the marathon rock drum solo.

Toad, on British rock band Cream's 1968 album Wheels of Fire, goes on for more than 16, mostly tedious, minutes - with 13 minutes a drum solo - paving the way for Led Zeppelin's John Bonham to go on for more than 30.

It is probably for Cream, and as a pioneering rock drummer, that Baker, 74, will be remembered. However, he sees himself as a jazz musician, so jazz and world music have taken up far more of his time and recorded output.

The Cream reunion gigs in 2005 brought Baker back into the spotlight, and he was the subject of 2012 documentary Beware of Mr Baker. The title, which came from a sign outside the South African estate where he keeps his polo ponies, sets the tone for the myth-making in which he has lately indulged.

Baker - his ginger hair now grey, but the blue eyes which stare out from the cover of his latest album, Why?, still piercing - has taken the art of being a grumpy old man to an entirely new level. In poor health and with several wasted fortunes behind him, Baker likes to terrorise interviewers, and at one point in the making of Beware of Mr Baker struck director Jay Bulger with a metal cane on camera, drawing blood.

Baker has a poor opinion of much of humanity, and particularly the famous contemporaries with whom he shared stages in the 1960s. He respects Charlie Watts, but not the rest of the Rolling Stones.

The documentary and his autobiography, Hellraiser (2009), are studies in cantankerous arrogance, but - if largely unrepentant for past mistakes, including his protracted heroin addiction and a long string of failed musical, personal and business relationships - he has much to be arrogant about.