Who remembers Ginger Baker? The legendary British drummer born in Lewisham in 1939 set the music world alight in the ’60s as part of threesome Cream with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce.

But Baker was then and now essentially a drummer of the blues and of jazz, who began with the blues-drenched Graham Bond Organisation in 1964.

He was inspired by the greatest of British jazz drummers, Phil Seaman of Burton-on-Trent, and counted as his friends and “uncles” three legendary jazz drumming giants — Max Roach, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones, who he befriended in the US.

And beyond jazz for Baker was the drumming of Africa. It stretched back to 1970 when a visit to Nigeria sparked a fascination with the country’s music, prompting him to establish a recording studio in Lagos and make records with Fela Kuti.

Living in Colorado in the ’90s, Baker established a powerful jazz outfit with the trumpeter Ron Miles called the Denver Jazz Quintet-to-Octet (DJQ2O) which in 1998 waxed fine jazz record Coward of the County with the mighty tenor saxophonist James Carter as guest.

In February 2014, he recorded the album Why? with a new band called Jazz Confusion by Baker — a quartet comprising Baker, African percussionist Abass Dodoo on drums, US saxophonist “Pee Wee” Ellis and English bassist Alec Dankworth.

Baker’s quizzical album title reveals a strongly elegiac session with many allusions to times, tunes and people past, referred to sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly — beginning with Ginger Spice, written by his old trumpet confrere Ron Miles and recorded on Coward of the County.

Straight away the percussive unity between Ginger and Abass impresses and Ellis’s depth of tone and gurgling notes add to the combustion. Dankworth’s solo is full of the earth.

Twelve and More Blues shows clearly and doubtlessly where Baker’s musical roots are, although strangely in this context you still hear snatches of Cream, Blind Faith and Airforce pounding through his drums.

Dankworth’s sound is again huge and resonating and when the two drummers create a palaver following his solo, it is the sound of a fiercely beautiful concord.

Cyril Davis remembers another British blues hero of the ’60s and Ellis’s wailing tenor finds the memories and sense of loss with a keening eloquence.

Dankworth, from another generation, also offers a pulsating homage. Wayne Shorter’s classic tune Footprints follows with Dankworth’s perennial twang pressing the melody forward under Ellis’s lucid narrative and the eternal drums, their wake leading directly back to Africa.

Baker’s tune, Ain Temouchant, again expresses how inseparable are these drums and drummers, London and Africa unified in a Wiltshire studio. There’s no grandstanding, no attempt to draw these drums apart — it is as if a percussion amalgam has founded and inspired the music.

So when Sonny Rollins’ melody of his parents’ Virgin Islands birthplace St Thomas begins to rock through the studio with Ellis’s horn in dancing pulse and Dankworth’s beat swinging over the ocean to the Caribbean, there is a sudden joy in the sound and a blithe parading in its impact.

Then, suddenly, the Atlantic is crossed again and the Nigerian folk tune Aiko Biaye rocks from the grooves with the drums in full and jubilant life still pounding as one.

The final, enigmatic title track, is based around the spiritual Wade in the Water that the Graham Bond Organisation once made their own in their frantic and dissolute tours around the cities of Britain.

Bond’s own blues-aching life ended prematurely and tragically in 1974 and Ellis’s painful saxophone narrative — Bond was himself a fine but underachieving alto saxophonist as well as an organist — tells of his life and all the sadnesses of other broken lives that Baker has worked with and known in a full life of music.

This album tells of that life in the truth of a very special and unique way of jazz, Africa and the blues and is a musical experience not to be missed.