POP MUSIC REVIEW : Jack Bruce Proves His Time Is Now : Rock: ‘60s star of Cream shows that graying rockers can remain alert to the present and to new creative possibilities.

For some ‘60s-vintage rockers, 1989 was the year to cash in by playing the same old stuff. For others it was a year for proving that being fortysomething doesn’t mean you can’t find fresh energy and new insights.

Before he even walked on stage at the Coach House on Wednesday, Jack Bruce had established his credentials as one of the ‘60s veterans entering the ‘90s attuned to the Muse instead of sodden by Mamon. Bruce’s new album, “A Question of Time,” stands with the ’89 releases of Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed as evidence that graying rockers can remain alert to their times and to new creative possibilities.

“A Question of Time” is an album of broad musical scope, alluding to, but hardly banking on, Bruce’s bankable old incarnation as the singer, bassist and main songwriter of Cream, the first British supergroup. With “Question,” Bruce displays undiminished skills and an ambitious purpose as he surveys the precarious state of morals and politics in the late 20th Century. A verse from “Flying,” one of Bruce’s new songs, can stand as a credo for any aging rocker seeking to preserve artistic vitality:

I’m gonna tell it like tomorrow

Play it like the past

Mix up joy and sorrow

So the echoes last Bruce lived up to that credo at the Coach House, going for invention and immediacy at almost every turn, even as he managed to please a packed audience clamoring to lap up Cream (an appetite whetted by the fact that this tour reunites Bruce with Cream’s drummer, Ginger Baker). The second half of the show featured the still-prodigious Baker, who took over on drums after an opening hour in which Tom Goss kept a more standard sort of time on songs from “A Question of Time” and some less well-known selections from Cream and Bruce’s fine early solo albums.

With Baker rolling and tumbling with a jazz player’s abandon, Bruce served up such Cream staples as “White Room,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Toad” and “N.S.U.” But Bruce and a talent-laden band that also included Bernie Worrell on keyboards used the oldies as points of departure for extended instrumental explorations. Only “White Room” was a disappointment, coming across with its drama blunted.

Although Bruce’s voice was husky and unable to match the clear tenor flights that he musters on his new album, he proved to be a resourceful singer with a distinctive approach to the blues in this blues-dominated show. He also was an enthusiastic performer who took pleasure in interacting with his band mates, and a humorous quipster who took oblique jabs at the use of U.S. military might in Panama or ribbed his old buddy Ginger with insouciant cockney-isms. Bruce told jokes with his bass, too, making it sound, at one point, like a vaudevillian’s kazoo.

At 46, Bruce showed he is attuned to the new by employing a hot teen-age guitarist named Blues Saraceno. Saraceno was flashy and fluid, but he showed a strong streak of the contemporary metal-influenced mania for spraying notes around as if a guitar were an automatic rifle. Bruce made savvy use of this rambunctiousness, though, turning Saraceno’s overdone guitar solos into wailing wall backdrops for supple, trenchant bass runs of his own.

Worrell, the veteran of Talking Heads and Funkadelic, was a bit under-used. But he and Bruce connected during an epic version of the funereal “Blues You Can’t Lose” (during which Bruce’s concluding bass trembles conveyed the sense of vertigo that comes with an overdose of sorrow). The show ended with a titanic, 20-minute version of “Spoonful” in which Saraceno stayed under control, leaving the floor open for some fine interplay between Bruce, Baker and Worrell.

Far from a calculated rehash of past glories, Bruce and company used this long show to seek--and most often to find--fresh musical moments.