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I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.

Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’ 'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what music is and could be.

So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Sonny Clark (1931-1963): Legendary and iconic musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher



SOUND PROJECTIONS
   
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
    
EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU
    
SUMMER, 2017

VOLUME FOUR         NUMBER TWO  
 
JOHN COLTRANE  
 
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

EARTH WIND AND FIRE
(May 20-May 26)

JACK DEJOHNETTE
(May 27-June 2)

ALBERT AYLER
(June 3-June 9)

VI REDD
(June 10-June 16)

LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS
(June 17-June 23)

JULIAN “CANNONBALL” ADDERLEY
(June 24-June 30)

JAMES NEWTON
(July 1-July 7)

ART TATUM
(July 8-July 14)

SONNY CLARK
(July 15-July 21)

JASON MORAN
(July 22-July 28)

SONNY STITT
(July 29-August 4)

BUD POWELL
(August 5-August 11)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sonny-clark-mn0000036934/biography 
Sonny Clark
(1931-1963)

Artist Biography by



Cool Struttin'

Like Fats Navarro and Charlie Parker before him, Sonny Clark's life was short but it burned with musical intensity. Influenced deeply by Bud Powell, Clark nonetheless developed an intricate and hard-swinging harmonic sensibility that was full of nuance and detail. Regarded as the quintessential hard bop pianist, Clark never got his due before he passed away in 1963 at the age of 31, despite the fact that it can be argued that he never played a bad recording date either as a sideman or as a leader. Known mainly for seven records on the Blue Note label with a host of players including such luminaries as John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, Paul Chambers, Wilbur Ware, Philly Joe Jones, and others, Clark actually made his recording debut with Teddy Charles and Wardell Gray, but left soon after to join Buddy DeFranco. His work with the great clarinetist has been documented in full in a Mosaic set that is now sadly out of print. Clark also backed Dinah Washington, Serge Chaloff, and Sonny Criss before assuming his role as a leader in 1957. Clark's classic is regarded as Cool Struttin' but each date he led on Blue Note qualifies as a classic, including his final date, Sonny's Crib with John Coltrane. And though commercial success always eluded him, he was in demand as a sideman and played dozens of Alfred Lion-produced dates, including Tina Brooks' Minor Move. Luckily, Clark's contribution is well documented by Alfred Lion; he has achieved far more critical, musical, and popular acclaim than he ever did in life.

 https://sites.google.com/site/pittsburghmusichistory/pittsburgh-music-story/jazz/modern-era/sonny-clark

Sonny Clark

The Quintessential Hard Bop pianist and composer for Blue Note Records
Sonny Clark 
(1931-1963)



Sonny Clark was an extraordinary modern jazz pianist and composer noted for his nine classic Blue Note albums.  His most acclaimed albums "Cool Struttin" and "Leapin and Lopin" is rated by some critics among  among the best jazz recordings of all time.  Appearing on Clark’s recordings were jazz legends John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Pittsburgh’s Paul Chambers.  Clark is called the “quintessential hard bop pianist”.  From 1957 through 1962 he was the resident pianist for Blue Note recording sessions.  He appeared on the recordings of hard pop players Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Wilbur Ware along with recording with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine, and Lee Morgan.  He began his career touring with with saxophonist Wardell Gray, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, and  Dinah Washington before he settled in New York to become a Blue Note artist.

“He has all of the chops, inventiveness, and speed to burn that made him one of the most impressive pianists of the hard bop era.” - Michael G. Nastos Allmusic.com

Sonny Clark’s playing style and original compositions were influenced by Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Horace Sliver.  He had is own distinct touch and tone that colored his long flowing relaxed melodic lines and lively driving rhythmic solos.  His music combined minor blues and hard swing.  Pianist Bill Evans cites Sonny Clark as a major influence.  Clark's music has been immensely popular in Japan.  Since 1991 his “Cool Struttin” CD has sold 179,000 copies out selling John Contrane’s “Blue Train” album.

Sonny Clark was born Conrad Yeatis Clark on July 21, 1931 in the small coal mining town Herminie No. 2 about twenty five miles southeast of Pittsburgh.  His parents grew up and met in the rural countryside of Stone Mountain Georgia before migrating to Western Pennsylvania.  They moved first to Aliquippa where his father worked in the coke yards of Jones & Laughlin Steel. Driven from Aliquippa by KKK activity the Clarks moved to more rural Herminie mining town to raise their family.  Sonny’s coal miner father, Emory Clark, died of black lung disease on August 2 of 1931.  The youngest of eight children Sonny was raised by his mother Ruth Shepherd Clark and his older siblings. Upon Emory’s death the Clark family moved from their mining company owned house to the Redwood Inn hotel in Herminie.  Owned by African American John Redwood the hotel held popular weekend jazz dances attended by African Americans who came from a 50 mile radius to attend  Sony began playing piano at age four while living at the Redwood Inn. He studied piano with a private teacher and was also taught by his older brother George.  During elementary school at age 6 Sonny began playing piano professionally at the hotel.  Sonny also appeared on a radio amateur hour show at age 6 performing a boogie-woogie.  Hearing that audiences marveled at Sonny’s performances the Pittsburgh Courier published an article about the young pianist.   

Hearing the music of Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Cout Basie, and Duke Ellington on the radio, he fell in love with jazz.  Attending high school in Jeanette he played bass and vibes with his high school band and also performed as a  piano soloist. He performed professionally around Pittsburgh while still in school.  At age 15 Sonny appeared on the bill of the historic “Night of the Stars” Concert held at the Syria Mosque to celebrate the music of Pittsburgh’s jazz superstars.  Presented by the Frog Club and the Pittsburgh Courier on August 7, 1946 the show featured an all star cast of legendary Pittsburgh pianists Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn, and Erroll Garner and jazz greats Billy Eckstein, Roy Eldridge, Maxine Sullivan, Ray Brown, Louis Deppe and more.

In 1951, when Sonny was 19, his older brother, also a pianist, took him on a trip to visit their aunt in Los Angeles.  Sonny decided to stay in California and found work performing with Wardell Grey and Vido Musso.  Working in California Sonny played with the key figures in the West Coast jazz movement including Stan Getz, Art Farmer. Wardell Grey, Anita O’Day, and Shelly Manne.  His was one of the few African Americans performing West Coast jazz.   Sonny made with recording debut in 1953 with saxophonist Wardell Grey on the Verve label.   He joined Oscar Pettiford’s band and moved to San Francisco.  In San Fransisco he joined Buddy DeFranco’s band.  Sonny performed with Buddy DeFranco for two and a half years beginning with a tour of Europe and the U.S in 1954.  Sonny recorded his first album as a trio leader in 1955.  Titled “Oakland” it featured   bassist Jerry Good and drummer Al Randall and was recorded at the Mocambo Club in Oakland in January of 1955,  Sonny joined the Lighthouse All Stars in Hermosa Beach playing with them throughout 1956.   Wanting to travel back East and to visit his family in Pittsburgh on the way, Sonny took a job touring with Dinah Washington in February of 1957.   
Sonny age 15 at Night of the Stars Syria Mosque- 
Teenie Harris Photo
Settling in New York in 1957 he worked dates with West Coast jazz artists including two weeks at Birdland with Stan Getz and a weekend with Anita O'Day.  Switching from West Coast Jazz to Hard Bop Sonny quickly became a requested sideman playing with hardpop players John Coltrane, Dextor Gorden, Kenny Burrell, and more. He began recording on the prestigious Blue Note label at age 26. Sonny recorded 29 Blue Note sessions as a band leader and a sideman.  He made 17 recordings in 1957 including five album recordings for Blue Note.  His first recording as a band leader was “Dial S for Sonny” released in 1957. His second release in 1957 was “Sonny‘s Crib” that featured a band comprised of John Coltrane and Paul Chambers. The album Sonny Clark Trio with Paul Chambers Philly Joe Jones was also released in 1957.  The classic “Cool Struttin’ album and the “Standards” albums were released in 1958.  Critic Thom Jurek of Allmusic.com calls the title tract “Cool Struttin: “one of the preeminent swinging medium blues pieces in jazz history.”  The album “My Conception” featuring tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley was released in 1959.  The “Sonny Clark Trio” album with George Duvivier and Max Roach was released in 1960. His last album “Leapin' and Lopin” released in 1961 featuring four song composed by Clark includes the classics tracts “Vodoo” and “Something Special”.  Writer Michael G. Nastos of Allmusic.com calls “Leapin and Lopin” one of the definitive recording for all time in the mainstream jazz idiom.

In 1962 Sonny performed with Dexter Gordon on two of his classic Blue Note albums “Go” and “A Swinging Affair”.  He was Gorden’s favorite piano accompanist.  Sonny also recorded in 1962 the albums Blue and Sentimental and Easy Living with Ike Quebec, Born to be Blue and Nigeria with Grant Green, the Jackie McLean Quintet and  Tippin' the Scales with Jackie McLean, and Jubliee Shout with Stanley Turrentine.

Sonny died of a heart attack on Sunday, January 13, 1963 at the age of 31. He had been in poor health due to his heroin and alcohol addictions.  Sonny played his last gigs two nights before his death on January 11 and 12 at Junior’s Bar on at the Alvin Hotel on Fifty-second and Broadway.  Sonny’s friend, jazz patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, called Clark’s older sister in Pittsburgh to tell her of her brother’ passing.  The baroness paid to transport Sonny’s body back to Pittsburgh and paid for his funeral.  Sonny’s grave lies in the Greenwood Cemetery in Sharpsburg, PA.

All Music Guide

References:
Cookin': hard bop and soul jazz, 1954-65 
Kenny Mathieson

 The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz 
By Leonard Feather, Ira Gitler

 Sonny Clark Trio liner notes by Lenard Feather

 Sonny Clark -Lee Bloom & Mike Waters

 http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/sonny-clark-at-eighty






Sonny Clark at Eighty
July 21, 2011
The New Yorker

Sam Stephenson, who is doing remarkable research on the life of the short-lived jazz pianist and composer Sonny Clark, posts at the Jazz Loft Project today on the occasion of Clark’s birthday; he died in 1963, but, were he alive today, he’d be eighty. Stephenson also announces that he’s got a long piece about Clark coming this fall in Tin House:

"There are quotes from trombonist Curtis Fuller, former Five Spot bartender Bob Whiteside, writer A.B. Spellman, Jean Redwood Douglass (a childhood friend of Sonny’s), Times writer Ben Ratliff, and novelist Haruki Murakami…"
There’s also an effort to better understand addictions in mid-century jazz, leaning on Spellman and on Nat Hentoff’s 1961 book, “The Jazz Life.”

I’m impatient to read it. (For the record, Fuller and Clark recorded together frequently in 1957-58, including on two of Clark’s few dates as a leader, “Dial ‘S’ for Sonny” and “Sonny’s Crib”; the latter also features John Coltrane.) The story of alcohol and drug addictions is indeed inseparable from the story of postwar jazz. The details that emerge from interviews with musicians are horrific, but I’d steel myself to read a broad and analytical work on the subject. (And I’ve just ordered a copy of Hentoff’s book, which I’ve never read.) 

 Also, Stephenson’s post—featuring a 1946 photo of Clark, then fifteen, playing piano at Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque (a famed performance space)—made me wonder: there’s another great Pittsburgh-born pianist, a year older than Clark, Ahmad Jamal, who is still alive, well, and gigging (last week, Francis Marmande wrote an appreciation of him in Le Monde on the occasion of his performance at the Nice Jazz Festival), and I’d like to know whether the two musicians knew each other in their youth.  

Clark isn’t the only wondrous musician of his generation to lose his life to drugs, but his influence, in proportion (or disproportion) to his modest renown, may be the greatest. Though Horace Silver is often credited, along with Art Blakey, as the motive force of hard bop, a blues-based crystallization of the bebop style, Silver (who is eighty-two) was a greater popularizer than a soloist, a better composer of catchy themes than of inspiring ones. Clark’s bluesy tunes sparked his own—and others’—solos of complex and joyful spontaneity, and his accompaniments were as challenging as they were tasteful. Judging from the remarkable range of his collaborations in his brief career, he was truly a musicians’ musician.



 
SONNY CLARK


Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark was an American jazz pianist who mainly worked in the hard bop idiom. 

Clark was born and raised in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town southeast of Pittsburgh. At age 12, he moved to Pittsburgh. When visiting an aunt in California at age 20, Clark decided to stay and began working with saxophonist Wardell Gray. Clark went to San Francisco with Oscar Pettiford and after a couple months, was working with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco in 1953. Clark toured the U.S. and Europe with DeFranco until January 1956, when he joined The Lighthouse All-Stars, led by bassist Howard Rumsey.

Wishing to return to the east coast, Clark served as accompanist for singer Dinah Washington in February 1957 in order to relocate to New York City. In New York, Clark was often requested as a sideman by many musicians, partly because of his rhythmic comping. He frequently recorded for Blue Note Records, playing as a sideman with many hard bop players, including Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Wilbur Ware. He also recorded sessions with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine, and Lee Morgan.

As a band leader, Clark recorded albums “Dial “S” for Sonny” (1957), “Sonny's Crib” (1957), Sonny Clark Trio (1957), with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, and Cool Struttin' (1958). Sonny Clark Trio, with George Duvivier and Max Roach was released in 1960.

Clark died of a heart attack in New York City, although commentators attribute the early death to Clark's drug and alcohol abuse.

Close friend and fellow jazz pianist Bill Evans dedicated the composition “NYC's No Lark” (an anagram of “Sonny Clark”) to him after his death, included on Evans' Conversations with Myself (1963). John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, Ray Drummond, and Bobby Previte recorded an album of Clark's compositions, Voodoo (1985), as The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet. Zorn also recorded several of Clark's compositions with Bill Frisell and George Lewis on News for Lulu (1988) and More News for Lulu (1992).
 
http://hardbop.tripod.com/clark.html

Sonny Clark   

Piano

July 21, 1931 -- January 13, 1963

"Sonny Clark died in 1963 at the age of thirty-one, a figure who had yet to gain his due as a musician. Recently his work, long neglected, has experienced a much deserved revival."
--Ted Gioia

Introduced to Blue Note aficianados with his first band date on Dial "S" For Sonny, Sonny Clark featured a front line composed of Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller and Hank Mobley. On his impressive follow-up session (Sonny's Crib) the horns consisted of Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller and John Coltrane. Before we listened together to the rewarding results of his initial trio date, Sonny took a few moments to clarify and amplify his biography. 

"Actually, I wasn't born in Pittsburgh," he said. "I was born in a little coal mining town, about sixteen miles southeast of Pittsburgh, called herminie, Pa.--population about 800. I was raised there till I was twelve, then lived in Pittsburgh until I was nineteen, just turning twenty; then an older brother, who plays piano, took me out to the coast to visit an aunt.

"Originally I only intended to stay a couple of months. I worked with Wardell Gray and all the fellows around the coast. Then Oscar Pettiford came to town and we got a band and went to San Francisco. 

"I worked in San Francisco a couple of months. Buddy DeFranco was in town, with Art Blakey, and Kenny Drew on piano and Gene Wright on bass. Then Blakey and Kenny Drew left him and I joined, along with Wesley Landers, a drummer from Chicago. He only stayed a couple of weeks, then Bobby White came in--this was late in 1953, and as you know, soon after that, in January and February of '54, we toured Europe in your show, Jazz Club, U.S.A."
"That's where the gaps begin in my notes," I said. "It's been four years since we all came back from europe and I can't account for everything that happened to you in that time. Perhaps you can fill me in." 

"Well," said Sonny, "I stayed with Buddy quite a long while after we went back to the coast. We made another tour, in the middle west, and we went to Honolulu. Altogether I was with Buddy about two-and-a-half years. Then in January, 1956, I joined Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars in Hermosa Beach, California and spent the whole year of 1956 there."

"How did you enjoy that?" 

"The climate is crazy. I'm going to be truthful, though: I did have sort of a hard time trying to be comfortable in my playing. The fellows out on the west coast have a different sort of feeling, a different approach to jazz. They swing in their own way. But Stan Levey, Frank Rosolino and Conte Candoli were a very big help; of course they all worked back in the east for a long time during the early part of their careers, and I think they have more of the feeling of the eastern vein than you usually find in the musicians out west. The eastern musicians play with so much fire and passion. 

"We did concerts and a lot of record dates, and I could have stayed as long as I liked, but I wanted to see the east again, and also wanted to see my people who still live in Pittsburgh--a brother and two sisters--and a sister in Dayton. I got to see all of them by joining Dinah Washington in February, 1957 and going along with her as accompanist more or less for the ride. 

"Since settling down in New York, I've been doing mostly recording. I played a couple of weeks at Birdland with Stan Getz, and a weekend with Anita O'Day. What I want to do eventually, of course, is have my own trio or quartet and play in the kind of setting I like best--the kind of music you hear in this album."
--LEONARD FEATHER, from the liner notes, Sonny Clark Trio, Blue Note.

A selected discography of Sonny Clark albums.
  • Dial "S" For Sonny, 1957, Blue Note.
  • Sonny's Crib, 1957, Blue Note.
  • Sonny Clark Trio, 1957, Blue Note.
  • My Conception, 1957-59, Blue Note.
  • Cool Struttin', 1958, Blue Note.
  • High Fidelity, 1960, Bainbridge.
  • Leapin' and Lopin', 1961, Blue Note.


http://sonnyclark.jazzgiants.net/biography/ 
 

Biography



Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark was born on July 21, 1931 in Herminie, Pennsylvannia and passed away on January 13, 1963 in New York City January 13, 1963 in New York City.

Clark was born and raised in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town southeast of Pittsburgh. At age 12, he moved to Pittsburgh. When visiting an aunt in California at age 20, Clark decided to stay and began working with saxophonist Wardell Gray. Clark went to San Francisco with Oscar Pettiford and after a couple months, was working with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco in 1953. Clark toured the U.S. and Europe with DeFranco until January 1956, when he joined The Lighthouse All-Stars, led by bassist Howard Rumsey.


Wishing to return to the east coast, Clark served as accompanist for singer Dinah Washington in February 1957 in order to relocate to New York City. In New York, Clark was often requested as a sideman by many musicians, partly because of his rhythmic comping. He frequently recorded for Blue Note Records, playing as a sideman with many hard bop players, including Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Wilbur Ware. He also recorded sessions with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine, and Lee Morgan.

As a band leader, Clark recorded albums “Dial “S” for Sonny” (1957), “Sonny’s Crib” (1957), Sonny Clark Trio (1957), with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, and Cool Struttin’ (1958). Sonny Clark Trio, with George Duvivier and Max Roach was released in 1960. Clark died of a heart attack in New York City in 1963.

Clark’s albums are generally upbeat affairs. His solos crackle with electricity, while he lends solid support to the horns (Clark stated in interviews that he enjoyed comping almost as much as he enjoyed soloing). On only a few occasions did Clark record in a trio setting, the most notable of which was the Sonny Clark Trio album.
Close friend and fellow jazz pianist Bill Evans dedicated the composition “NYC’s No Lark” (an anagram of “Sonny Clark”) to him after his death, included on Evans’ Conversations with Myself (1963).



https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/01/13/sonny-clark/ 


Sonny Clark

by Sam Stephenson

January 13, 2011

The Paris Review

Notes from a Biographer

 



Clark seated at piano backstage at Syria Mosque for Night of Stars event, 1946. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Heinz Family Fund; © 2004 Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive.


Forty-eight years ago today, the pianist Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark died of a heroin overdose in a shooting gallery somewhere in New York City. He was thirty-one. The previous two nights—January 11 and 12, 1963—he had played piano at Junior’s Bar on the ground floor of the Alvin Hotel on the northwest corner of Fifty-second and Broadway. On Sunday, January 13, the temperature reached thirty-eight degrees in Central Park.

The next thing we know with certainty is that Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a noted jazz patron, called Clark’s older sister in Pittsburgh to inform her of her brother’s death. Nica, as the baroness was known, said she would pay to have the body transported to his hometown and that she’d pay for a proper funeral.

What is not known, however, is if the body in the New York City morgue with Clark’s name on it was his. Witnesses in both New York and Pittsburgh (after the body arrived there) believed it wasn’t; they thought it didn’t look like Sonny. Some suspected a conspiracy with the drug underground with which Clark was entangled, but, as African Americans in a white system, they were reticent to discuss the matter. It was probably a simple case of carelessness at the morgue, something not uncommon with “street” deaths at the time, particularly when the corpses were African American. Today, there’s a gravestone with Clark’s name on it in the rural hills outside Pittsburgh, where a body shipped from New York was buried in mid-January of that year. How painful it must have been to stay silent and let a funeral proceed, not knowing for sure where Sonny’s body was. His may be one of the thousands of unidentified ones buried in potter’s field on New York’s Hart Island, where Sonny himself dug graves years earlier, while incarcerated at Riker’s Island on drug charges.

Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever at home. I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier. Over the next hour, I became transfixed by the relaxed, swinging blues floating out of the house stereo system. The multipierced barista showed me the two-CD case, Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark. Green was a guitarist from St. Louis with a singing, single-note style that blended beautifully with Clark’s effortless, hypnotic right-hand piano runs. “This is the epitome of cool,” she said. True. It was also smokin’ hot, and I heard a country twang in it. The nineteen tracks were recorded in December 1961 and January 1962 by the Blue Note label, but they weren’t released until many years later, after both Green and Clark were dead.

Clark was born on July 21, 1931, in Herminie No. 2, Pennsylvania, a coal patch a few miles from the bigger company town of Herminie (No. 2 refers to the second mine shaft of the Ocean Coal Company) and about twenty-five miles east of Pittsburgh. On August 2 of that year, his father, Emory Clark, a miner, died of “a lingering illness of tuberculosis,” as indicated in a brief obituary in a local paper. The family called it “black lung,” a casualty of the mine work. Sonny was the youngest of eight kids and was raised by his mother and his older siblings. The 1930 census shows their home surrounded by families from Italy, Poland, Austria, and Russia as well as African Americans from Georgia and Tennessee. This extraordinary mix of people existed in a company village of only a few hundred people. The town had a school, a few places of worship (including a black church), a beer garden, and a company store. There was also a black-owned hotel that hosted some of the most popular weekend dances in the region for African Americans. A small boy (and a small man, too: five-foot-five, one hundred thirty pounds full grown), Sonny began playing piano in the hotel while in elementary school. People marveled at his playing, and he was written up in the famous black paper, the Pittsburgh Courier. His oldest brother, Emory, carried Sonny home on his shoulders after he won a talent show. They skipped rocks across ponds and learned how to make slingshots from roadside weeds and brush. The family’s home was the countryside; Sonny’s parents had met as kids in the country, living across a dirt road from each other in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
 
My wife, Laurie Cochenour, grew up in Elizabeth Township, about seven miles from Herminie No. 2. For the past decade, I’ve done a bit of research on Sonny Clark each time we visit her family, and Sonny’s two surviving sisters have been helping me. I’ve driven through Herminie No. 2 and found old-timers, black and white, who grew up with him. One of them gave me their second-grade class picture from 1937–38. Sonny is the only black kid in the class. I now have an accordion file full of material. After my biography of W. Eugene Smith, a book on Sonny may follow.


Miss Allebrand's first-grade class, Washington School, 1937–38, Herminie No. 2, PA. Photograph courtesy of Betty Smith Dopkowski, who is standing to Sonny Clark's right.


My interest in Clark grew when I heard him on Smith’s tapes from the Sixth Avenue loft scene. In the wee morning hours of September 25, 1961, while packing to leave for Japan from Idlewild Airport later that day, Smith turned on his tape recorder and let it roll until dawn. He had live microphones in the hallway and stairwell. He captured Sonny and his friend, the saxophonist Lin Halliday, arriving at the building and walking up the bare wood stairs with Lin’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Virginia “Gin” McEwan. Sonny and Lin had been playing at the White Whale in the East Village earlier in the evening with bassist Butch Warren and drummer Billy Higgins. Sonny sticks his head in Smith’s door and says to the notorious pack rat, “You’ve got a lot of shit in here.” Smith responds, “I’ve been shitting for a long time.” They laugh. Sonny and Lin then go into the hallway bathroom on the fourth floor and shoot heroin. Smith’s tapes catch Sonny moaning to near unconsciousness. Lin grows anxious and then frightened. He sings to Sonny to try to keep him awake. Earlier that summer, Gin had saved Sonny’s life with amateur CPR after an overdose. But now, when Lin calls out for her—“Gin? Gin? Gin?”—she does not respond; she had already moved somewhere else in the building. The tension in the harrowing scene mounts. How miraculous (and perhaps questionable) that such a moment is caught on plastic reel-to-reel tape, to be heard in real time a half-century later in a digitally transferred file.

Meanwhile, in his room packing for Japan, Smith plays vinyl records of Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poetry and actress Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson. (Smith owned the entire Caedmon Records inventory). Over time, Sonny’s dose wears off, and he and Lin shuffle down to the automat for cheeseburgers and milkshakes. For money, they tote several dozen bottles that Smith gave them to redeem for deposits at the grocery store. It’s not clear if Smith ever saw Sonny Clark again. He spent a year in Japan, and Sonny went on to record the great tracks with Grant Green, as well as several other classic Blue Note albums, before dying sixteen months later.

Read the second part of Stephenson’s look back at Sonny Clark here.
See also: “Dorrie Glenn Woodson” and “W. Eugene Smith.”

Sam Stephenson is the author of The Jazz Loft Project. He is currently at work on a biography of W. Eugene Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Check back soon for more of Stephenson’s dispatches.
Sonny Clark, Part 2
by Sam Stephenson


Notes from a Biographer


 


Sonny Clark, ca. 1961. Photograph by Francis Wolff. (c) Mosaic Images (www.mosaicrecords.com)


 On October 26, 1961, Sonny Clark reported to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, for a recording session led by alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. Clark brought with him a new composition he called “Five Will Get You Ten.” He was an effective composer, and his tunes were welcome at most sessions. However, this one he’d stolen from Thelonious Monk. He had probably seen the sheet music or heard Monk working out the tune on the piano at the Weehawken, New Jersey, home of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who routinely made her home a rest stop and clubhouse for jazz musicians. 


Monk called the tune “Two Timer”; Clark gave it a new name so he could claim composer’s royalties. It was the move of a desperate, depleted junky. (W. Eugene Smith had cameras, lenses, and other equipment stolen from his loft by jazz junkies all the time, but, an addict himself, he wasn’t one to judge. The thefts would leave him both distraught and ambivalent.) According to Robin D. G. Kelley’s remarkable recent biography of Monk, the elder master treated Clark like a “troubled younger brother,” and he never did anything about the stolen tune. Chances are that by the time Monk heard McLean’s record and realized what had happened, Clark was dead, or in some other condition that made a reprimand irrelevant. 

In the last eighteen months of Clark’s life, he would climb to daylight for brief periods, breath clean air, play some beautiful music, and then sink to lower and lower depths. In the August 1962 issue of the invaluable, idiosyncratic Canadian jazz magazine, Coda, there was this report from New York by Fred Norsworthy: 

One of the saddest sights these days is the terrible condition of one of the nation’s foremost, and certainly original pianists. Having been around for many years he came into his own in 1959 and no one deserved it more than he. I feel that something should be done about drug addiction before we lose many more artists. I saw him several times in the past three months and was shocked to see one of our jazz greats in such pitiful shape. Unfortunately, the album dates that he keeps getting only help his addiction get worse instead of better. Whether or not he licks this problem at this stage of the game remains to be seen. In some cases people refuse help and the loss of a close friend was no help either. If anything he took a turn for the worse and disappeared for 3 weeks. However right now should he die it will at least be better than living a slow death with no relief in sight.

The pianist is almost certainly Sonny Clark. That same month, he cut two classic Blue Note albums under the leadership of saxophonist Dexter Gordon, Go and A Swinging Affair. When Clark died five months later, Gordon remembered these sessions in a letter to Blue Note impresarios Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff: Clark had “almost totally given up” on his life, Gordon wrote. Yet judging from the surviving albums, he still cooked on piano. Several of Clark’s solos are top notch, but in this rhythm section with Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, he conducts a clinic on how to play sensitive, sparkling piano accompaniment behind a soloing saxophonist, in this case the atmospheric Gordon. Clark didn’t appear to give up on anything musically. Many years later Gordon remembered Go as among his career favorites.

As a potential biographer of Sonny Clark, I have to be careful of the notion of the damaged, tragic artist having an aesthetic advantage (I have to be careful of this for Eugene Smith, too). He grew up not far from where my wife did, near the Allegheny hills where her ancestors migrated for work, same as Sonny’s parents. I’m drawn to these hills like a second home; the place haunts me. How did a black man come from here and learn such an extraordinary facility on piano? Why did he become such a stereotypical jazz junkie? Why is the wrong body apparently buried underneath his gravestone in these hills?


I’m curious, too, about his remarkable popularity in Japan today, a country in which he never stepped foot. Consider these facts: From 1991, when Soundscan began tracking CD sales, through 2009, Clark’s 1958 Blue Note recording, Cool Struttin’, sold 38,000 copies in America and 179,000 in Japan. Those numbers alone are eye-opening. But a quick comparison illustrates just how astonishing they really are: John Coltrane’s classic 1957 Blue Note recording, Blue Train, sold 545,000 copies in America over the same period and 147,000 copies in Japan. Cool Struttin’ outsells Blue Train in Japan. 

Aesthetically, the two records are very much of the same time and place. Both feature front lines of saxophone, trumpet, and piano backed by Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums, and they were recorded by the same label in the same studio, only four months apart. The real distinction is that Blue Train is an entry-level recording by a saxophonist who went on to become one of the most feverish and supreme giants of American music, while Cool Struttin’ could be described by a cynic as a fine but routine, almost potluck jam session typical of the period.

I’m not yet sure how to explain the unusual prestige of Cool Struttin’ in Japan. In February, I embark on a five-week trip to research W. Eugene Smith’s work there in the 1960s and ’70s along with his World War II combat photography in Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere in the Pacific. While there, I’ll spend some time trying to figure out the reasons for Clark’s popularity. Perhaps it’s just a fluke. I believe there’s more to it. My feeling is that the Japanese audience may have a special ear for the beauty of Clark’s minor blues. This occurred to me when I was listening to one of Smith’s loft tapes. On May 8, 1960, Smith made an audio recording of Edward R. Murrow’s CBS program, Small World, from Channel 2 in New York City. The episode featured Yukio Mishima and Tennessee Williams in a discussion of Japanese cinema.

MISHIMA
I think a characteristic of Japanese character is just this mixture of very brutal things and elegance. It’s a very strange mixture. 

WILLIAMS
I think that you in Japan are close to us in the Southern states of the United States.

MISHIMA
I think so.

WILLIAMS
A kind of beauty and grace. So that although it is horror, it is not just sheer horror, it has also the mystery of life, which is an elegant thing.

This “very strange mixture” of the brutal and the elegant may describe what Japanese jazz fans hear coming out of Clark’s piano. His parents came from rural, Jim Crow Georgia and moved to Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, so Sonny’s father could work in the coke yards of Jones & Laughlin Steel. They were chased away by KKK activity there and ended up in a company coal-mining village that reminded them of their rural Southern home near a rock quarry. Mr. Clark died of black-lung disease two weeks after Sonny was born. Mrs. Clark died of breast cancer when he was twenty-two. The family dispersed; Sonny followed a brother to Los Angeles, where it didn’t take him long to rise to the top of the jazz scene, a topsy-turvy milieu drizzled with narcotics.

No jazz pianist was more drenched in minor blues than Clark. Yet he blended his blues with a buoyant, ventilated swing. And to this day, nobody sounds like Sonny Clark. 

Click here to read part 1 of Stephenson on Sonny Clark.

Sam Stephenson is the author of The Jazz Loft Project. He is currently at work on a biography of W. Eugene Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Check back soon for more of Stephenson’s dispatches.     
THE MUSIC OF SONNY CLARK: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH SONNY CLARK:

Sonny Clark-- 'Cool Struttin'--Full Album:


Artist: Sonny Clark Album: Cool Struttin' 
Label: Blue Note 
1958 

Tracks:

01 Cool Struttin'  
00:00 02 Blue Minor  
09:22 03 Sippin'

Sonny Clark--'Leapin' and Lopin'--Full Album:

Sonny Clark Trio with Max Roach & 

George Duvivier (Full Album):

 

 Sonny's Crib--Full Album:


Sonny's Mood--Full Album:

 Sonny Clark--'Bebop':

Sonny Clark--"Voodoo":

Sonny Clark--'Bebop'--Full Album:

Sonny Clark Jazzcloud:

Sonny Clark--'Dial 'S' for Sonny--Full album:

Sonny Clark



From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sonny Clark
Sonny Clark.jpg
Background information
Birth name Conrad Yeatis Clark
Born July 21, 1931 Herminie, Pennsylvania, United States
Died January 13, 1963 (aged 31) New York City, New York, United States
Genres Jazz, hard bop
Occupation(s) Musician
Instruments Piano
Years active 1953–1962
Labels Blue Note
Associated acts Curtis Fuller, Jackie McLean, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, Serge Chaloff, Max Roach, George Duvivier, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Wardell Gray, Bennie Green, Clifford Jordan, Buddy DeFranco, Oscar Pettiford


Conrad Yeatis "Sonny" Clark (July 21, 1931 – January 13, 1963) was an American jazz pianist who mainly worked in the hard bop idiom.[1]

 

Contents

 

 

Early life

 

Clark was born and raised in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town east of Pittsburgh.[2] His parents were originally from Stone Mountain, Georgia.[2] His miner father, Emory Clark, died of a lung disease two weeks after Sonny was born.[2] Sonny was the youngest of eight children.[2] At age 12, he moved to Pittsburgh.

 

Later life and career

 

When visiting an aunt in California at age 20, Clark decided to stay and began working with saxophonist Wardell Gray. Clark went to San Francisco with Oscar Pettiford and after a couple months, was working with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco in 1953. Clark toured the United States and Europe with DeFranco until January 1956, when he joined The Lighthouse All-Stars, led by bassist Howard Rumsey.
Wishing to return to the east coast, Clark served as accompanist for singer Dinah Washington in February 1957 in order to relocate to New York City. In New York, Clark was often requested as a sideman by many musicians, partly because of his rhythmic comping. He frequently recorded for Blue Note Records, playing as a sideman with many hard bop players, including Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Wilbur Ware. He also recorded sessions with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine, and Lee Morgan.
As a band leader, Clark recorded albums Dial "S" for Sonny (1957), Sonny's Crib (1957), Sonny Clark Trio (1957), with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, and Cool Struttin' (1958). Sonny Clark Trio, with George Duvivier and Max Roach was released in 1960.
Clark died in New York City; the official cause was listed as a heart attack, but the likely cause was a heroin overdose.[3][4][5][6]

 

Legacy

 

Close friend and fellow jazz pianist Bill Evans dedicated the composition "NYC's No Lark" (an anagram of "Sonny Clark") to him after his death, included on Evans' Conversations with Myself (1963). John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, Ray Drummond, and Bobby Previte recorded an album of Clark's compositions, Voodoo (1985), as the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet. Zorn also recorded several of Clark's compositions with Bill Frisell and George Lewis on News for Lulu (1988) and More News for Lulu (1992).

 

Discography

 

As leader

 

Compilations

As sideman

With Tina Brooks
With Serge Chaloff
With Sonny Criss
  • Go Man! (Imperial Records, 1956)
  • Sonny Criss Plays Cole Porter (Imperial, 1956)
With Buddy DeFranco
  • In a Mellow Mood (1954)
  • Cooking the Blues (1955)
  • Autumn Leaves (1956)
  • Sweet and Lovely (1956)
  • Jazz Tones (1956)
With Lou Donaldson
With Curtis Fuller
With Dexter Gordon
With Bennie Green
With Grant Green[7]
These albums were recorded in 1961-62 for Blue Note, but not released until 1980. They have since been reissued as The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark.
With Johnny Griffin
With John Jenkins
With Philly Joe Jones
With Clifford Jordan
With Jackie McLean
With Hank Mobley
With Lee Morgan
With Ike Quebec
With Sonny Rollins
With Frank Rosolino
With Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse
  • Mexican Passport (1956)
  • Music for Lighthousekeeping (1956)
  • Oboe/Flute (1956)
With Louis Smith
With Stanley Turrentine
With Don Wilkerson

 

References







  • Palmer, Robert (March 18, 1987). "The Pop Life; Recalling Sonny Clark". The New York Times. Retrieved on September 1, 2007.

  • Stephenson, Sam (January 13, 2011) "Notes from a Biographer: Sonny Clark". The Paris Review.

  • Blue Note Records: the biography By Richard Cook

  • Bebop By Scott Yanow p. 252

  • The rough guide to jazz By Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, Brian Priestley. p. 117

  • Kelly, Robin (November 2, 2014). Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Simon and Schuster. p. 331. ISBN 978-1439190463.


    1. Reid Thompson. "Grant Green Quarter Recordings with Sonny Clark, reviewed by All That Jazz". Retrieved 2009-06-23.

     

    External links

     


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