SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2019

VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER ONE

HERBIE HANCOCK

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

MELBA LISTON

(November 30-December 6)

KENNY CLARKE

(December 7-13)

LEONTYNE PRICE

(December 14-20)

JIMMY LYONS

(December 21-27)

PATRICE RUSHEN

(December 28-January 3)

ELVIN JONES

(January 4-10)

GARY BARTZ

(January 11-17)

HALE SMITH

(January 18-24)

BENNY CARTER

(January 25-31)

BENNY GOLSON

(February 1-7)

BENNY BAILEY

(February 8-14)

SKIP JAMES

(February 15-21)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kenny-clarke-mn0000081796/biography

A key influence on the rhythmic development of bebop, drummer played with icons in the 1940s, formed legendary Modern Jazz Quartet.

Kenny Clarke

(1914-1985)

Artist Biography by Scott Yanow

Kenny Clarke was a highly influential if subtle drummer who helped to define bebop drumming. He was the first to shift the time-keeping rhythm from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, an innovation that has been copied and utilized by a countless number of drummers since the early '40s.

Clarke played vibes, piano and trombone in addition to drums while in school. After stints with Roy Eldridge (1935) and the Jeter-Pillars band, Clarke joined Edgar Hayes' Big Band (1937-38). He made his recording debut with Hayes (which is available on a Classics CD) and showed that he was one of the most swinging drummers of the era. A European tour with Hayes gave Clarke an opportunity to lead his own session, but doubling on vibes was a definite mistake! Stints with the orchestras of Claude Hopkins (1939) and Teddy Hill (1940-41) followed and then Clarke led the house band at Minton's Playhouse (which also included Thelonious Monk). The legendary after-hours sessions led to the formation of bop and it was during this time that Clarke modernized his style and received the nickname "Klook-Mop" (later shortened to "Klook") due to the irregular "bombs" he would play behind soloists. A flexible drummer, Clarke was still able to uplift the more traditional orchestras of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (1941) and the combos of Benny Carter (1941-42), Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins; he also recorded with Sidney Bechet. However after spending time in the military, Clarke stayed in the bop field, working with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and leading his own modern sessions; he co-wrote "Epistrophy" with Monk and "Salt Peanuts" with Gillespie. Clarke spent the late '40s in Europe, was with Billy Eckstine in the U.S. in 1951 and became an original member of the Modern Jazz Quartet (1951-55). However he felt confined by the music and quit the MJQ to freelance, performing on an enormous amount of records during 1955-56.
In 1956 Clarke moved to France where he did studio work, was hired by touring American all-stars and played with Bud Powell and Oscar Pettiford in a trio called the Three Bosses (1959-60). Clarke was co-leader with Francy Boland of a legendary all-star big band (1961-72), one that had Kenny Clarke playing second drums! Other than a few short visits home, Kenny Clarke worked in France for the remainder of his life and was a major figure on the European jazz scene.

https://www.moderndrummer.com/article/february-1984-kenny-clarke-jazz-pioneer/

Features

Kenny Clarke — Jazz Pioneer

by Ed Thigpen

It’s sad in a way, yet the fact remains that most drummers under the age of 25 probably aren’t all that familiar with the name Kenny Clarke. The truth of the matter is, Kenny Clarke is perhaps more responsible for the evolution of modern jazz drumming than any other single individual. The man is, in fact, the ultimate pioneer.

It’s understandably difficult for a young drummer to imagine that the various components of the drumset were ever utilized in a manner unlike the way they are today. In actuality, the approach was, at one time, considerably different, and Kenny Clarke had a whole lot to do with changing it all. His drumming led the way towards usage of the bass drum for accentuation as well as timekeeping; the establishment of a jazz-time rhythm for the ride cymbal, and freedom from a strictly metronomic role, forcing the bassist to share in the responsibility of timekeeping.

Kenny Clarke can also be credited with freeing the left hand so it could interact with the soloist—the obvious reason why thousands of young student drummers still sweat over Jim Chapin’s Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer, a classic text which captured the elements of “bop-style” drumming and documented it for us all. Most importantly, Kenny Clarke is primarily responsible for giving jazz drummers an opportunity to fully express themselves on the instrument, and un leashing the chains that bound them up to that point.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1914, Kenneth Spearman “Klook” Clarke began his career as a swing band drummer, enjoying a moderate degree of success with the likes of Roy Eldridge, Claude Hopkins, and The Edgar Hayes Orchestra. However, dissatisfied with the relentless press roll, and four-to-the-bar bass drum style so prevalent at the time, Clarke began to venture off in new directions, often losing gigs as a result of these daring rhythmic experiments. That is, until 1940, when he took his jazz drumming concepts to a place called Minton’s, a smoky little club on 118th Street in New York City. The rest is history, for it was here that the new style of drumming began to mesh with the musical ideas of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Thelonius Monk and Charlie “Yardbird” Parker in the formation of a new music soon to become known as “bebop. “It was a drumming style which would have an immediate impact on people like Max Roach, Art Blakey, Tiny Kahn, Stan Levy and Shelly Manne, a group of young drummers who would ultimately take the style to even greater heights.

To say that Kenny Clarke was “important,” or “influential,” or even “a key musical figure,” does not do his contribution justice. To state, unequivocally, that he was drumming’s all-time Great Emancipator, a man to whom every jazz drummer who’s ever lived owes a debt of gratitude, is perhaps a much more honest appraisal.

ET: I’d be interested to find out how you started. Did you start on drums?

KC: Well, not really. My father played trombone and my brother was also a musician. I was in a school where they had all kinds of instruments. We had a little parade band, and we used to parade all the time, sometimes for the Masons if they wanted a band. I actually started on peck horn. That was the easiest way, you know. Then I started playing the baritone horn, which was a little bigger, and then the trumpet. My mother also started me on piano and she taught me how to read music. She really instilled a love of music in me. In high school, I studied piano, trombone, vibes, theory and finally drums. I was working gigs in and around Pittsburgh as a drummer when I was in my teens. After I finished high school, I started hanging out with all the people who were in bands, and learning to improvise and spread out a little bit.

ET: What happened after that?

KC: I went to Cincinnati. We had a very hip band with Leroy Bradley. The young cats were so hip in that band. We were using stock arrangements, but sometimes we would invent things. I also worked the Cotton Club in Cincinnati and played all the shows.

ET: You once mentioned that, in order to play shows in those days, you had to play all the percussion instruments. Drummers really had to be percussionists in order to get work.

KC: Oh yeah, sure. And bass players had tubas; a big tuba sitting right on the stand. I had vibes; I always had vibes.

Anyway, on the weekends, all of the great big bands would come in: Duke, Don Redmond, Earl “Fatha” Hines. And that’s where I got to meet all of the great musicians of the day. After that I worked for a short while with Roy Eldridge. Roy was really chief of the trumpets at that time, you know. He could blow everybody out. Man, he was fantastic.

When I came to New York, I started working in the Village with some small groups, and then I got the opportunity to go to Europe with the Edgar Hayes band. We toured Finland and Sweden—all over—and I made my first recording with that band.

After the tour, I moved on to work with Claude Hopkins and then Teddy Hill. I worked at the Savoy with Teddy’s band, and that was great because that’s when I first got the chance to work with Dizzy. Diz had already been with the band in Paris and that’s when I first heard him.

ET: Who do you remember as being your very earliest drumming influences?

KC: Well, there weren’t that many really good drummers then. There was a guy named “Honeyboy” who did all kinds of tricks and stuff, but he wouldn’t settle down and keep the thing together. He’d be playing and singing, and sparks would be flying. He was a fantastic showman.

But there was one cat who taught me everything about cymbal playing. His name was Jimmy Peck. He was a pilot and he had fought in the Spanish-American War. Later he became one of the directing engineers at Bell Aircraft in Philadelphia. He was mean, baby—a smart player.

Of course, there was Baby Dodds, and though I had heard about him, I never got a chance to see him because he never came to my town. Anyway, I never liked that style of playing; that heavy, rolling type of drumming. It took too much time. I didn’t like it, but I played it to get into the clique. But through all of it, I was always thinking, there must be another way, you know. To “dig coal” all night long, man, you got so tired that you couldn’t pick up your bag the next morning. I used to say, “There must be an easier, simpler way to get the same effect and keep the band together without straining your arms.” I thought about it for many years. I was still basically playing the old way, but every once in a while I’d go up there and do that cymbal thing. Ding-ding-a-ding. The other guys would say, “What are you doin’, man? Get back on the snare drum.”

ET: You were actually moving the time feeling up to the cymbal.

KC: Yeah, yeah. I figured you could hear it better than on the snare drum. “Diggin” coal” would cover it all up.

ET: You once mentioned that you were quite tuned in to melody and harmony, and it seemed as though you wanted to complement that more.

KC: Sure. A lot of people said, “Klook, when you play drums, it sounds like a melody.” Well, that’s just what I was trying to do. When they’d say, “Take a solo,” I’d just hum “Sweet Sue” and keep on playing. And it would always come out right. They all knew when I’d taken a chorus. You knew when the 32 bars were up. That was my little trick for solos.

ET: After you got to New York, and you were playing with swing bands more, I imagine it was acceptable to be playing that ride rhythm on the cymbal, right?

KC: No, not in a big, organized band. They didn’t go for it even up to 1937 or 38. When I went to Europe with Edgar Hayes, I was playing a mixture.

ET: But it was still mostly on the snare drum?

KC: Yeah, and I’d say, “Oh man, I gotta do something to drive out the monotony.” Some guys would say, “Yeah man, pretty hip.” I’d say, “Look man, I can’t dig coal all night. I gotta do something.” So I’d play the figures with the brass, but then I’d have to start diggin’ that coal again. I was always trying to get away from that.

ET: Those press rolls?

KC: Yeah. You see, we didn’t really have a ride rhythm. I was trying to perfect that. I figured if I could perfect it, it would be a feather in my cap.

ET: When did the ride rhythm finally become more or less acceptable?

KC: It wasn’t accepted until we went up to Minton’s in 1940. I had gotten everything I was trying to do together by that time and my style was pretty well set.

ET: Tell me about the scene at Minton’s during those great days.

KC: Oh man, those were the days. When Teddy Hill became the manager at Minton’s, he turned the whole back room over to the musicians, and we could pretty much do as we pleased. I organized the first house band for the place with Monk, and Joe Guy on trumpet. All the great musicians in town would show up to sit in. That’s where the bebop movement was born. Teddy never told us what to play, or how to play. We just played whatever we felt. Work was pretty scarce at that time, so Teddy just wanted to do something for the guys who had worked for him.

Cats used to come from all over to listen to what we were doing and to sit in. Musicians from all over the country—Dizzy, Hot Lips Page, Georgie Auld, Roy Eldridge, and even Lester Young—would come around a lot. Lester loved what we were doing. All the musicians from whatever bands were working in town would come up after work. Jimmy Blanton, Duke’s bass player, was always dropping in. There was a lot of sitting in.

Kenny Clarke

ET: I’d be interested to hear what you recall about some of the pioneers of the movement who would come up to Minton’s to sit in, like Charlie Christian, for example.

KC: Charlie was a very quiet, very reserved little guy, and we used to really look forward to him coming up. He usually came in every night after he finished working downtown with Benny Goodman. Charlie talked about the place and what we were doing so much that even Benny came up once in a while. He sat in too.

Charlie contributed a tremendous amount to the new music and we were always swinging hard when he came up. He wrote some really great tunes as well. At the time, we didn’t even have a name for the music we were playing. It wasn’t even called “bebop” at that time. We just called it modern music.

ET: Dizzy?

KC: Diz was the most advanced of all of them as far as harmonies and rhythms went—very progressive. Roy Eldridge and Diz would always have these cutting contests, and at the time, Roy was always the favorite. People understood what he was doing more. But as time went on, the musicians started to catch on to what it was Diz was doing, and after a while, everybody kind of forgot about Roy. Then Diz became the trumpet player at Minton’s. But Roy never stopped coming up, though he never really did change his style. I owe a lot to Roy actually, because he always encouraged me when I was working out my ideas for a new style of drumming.

ET: Tadd Dameron?

KC: Tadd really impressed all of us. He was using flatted fifths in chords back as early as 1940, and though it sounded very odd to us at first, he was definitely a forerunner of the movement. He was also one of the first people to play full, 8th-note patterns in that real legato style.

ET: Charlie Parker?

KC: Bird first came to New York with Jay McShann’s band. He was working at a place called Monroe’s. The sessions were always either at Monroe’s or Minton’s. Well, Monroe’s used to open up after Minton’s closed, about four in the morning. So, we’d leave Minton’s and then go there.

We first went to hear Charlie at Monroe’s because the word was out that he sounded like Pres. Actually, Pres was the pacesetter at the time, so everyone was really interested to see what this young cat named Charlie Parker was doing with the music. Well, when we first heard him, we realized that this was a man with a whole lot more to offer. He’d play things that no one ever heard before—incredible stuff.

Bird was a very, very quiet guy. He was not talkative at all. He’d never talked much about what he was doing with the music. He’d just get up there and do it. I don’t think he ever realized himself the changes he was bringing about.

ET: What about the drummers who would come in?

KC: Well, when I was at Minton’s, nobody had really caught on to what I was doing with the instrument. I remember Sid Catlett came up one night, and he listened and listened. Finally he said, “Are you still playing the bass?” I said, “Yeah, but I make the accents off the four beats.” I couldn’t give that up and play with no bass drum. The accent wouldn’t have come in right.

Big Sid said, “Yeah, that’s it.” I looked around, and he and Jo Jones were both playing like that. Of course, Jo was a hi-hat man. But, I couldn’t make that hi-hat thing. I wanted my arms free.

ET: So you moved over to the ride cymbal.

KC: Yeah, I just moved over from the hi-hat to the ride and played the same thing that I’d been playing on the hi-hat. The hi-hat then became another instrument I could play with my left hand. It opened up the whole set, you know.

Before that, cats didn’t use the cymbal except for accents, endings and stuff like that. I wanted to use it all the time. But, I was always getting fired. I knew after the first night that I was out, so I would just pack up and move out. The boss would come over and say, “Look, we’ve got to get another drummer for tomorrow night.” And I’d say, “Okay man, I was just leaving. I’ve got my stuff packed.” And I’d split.

ET: But you persevered, which is what an innovator has to do.

KC: Oh, I did believe I was on the right track; that what I was doing was right. If nobody else liked it, the hell with them. I’d just keep playing like that anyway.

ET: Well, fortunately, not everyone closed their ears to what you were doing.

KC: No. They used to come to Minton’s. I’d look out there and it would be all drummers. Art Blakey used to hang out there a lot and he got the style down real good. And Max too.

But it took a long time to figure out what to do with my left hand. A lot of cats helped me. They saw it was a usable style coming into action. Jim Chapin, cats like that, would hang around all the time. He’d never leave me to see what I was doing with my left hand. And, of course, he wrote the book on it. He wrote down all the stuff we did. But I didn’t care. As long as it got to the cats, I was happy.

ET: Your whole approach has always been from the standpoint of playing the drums as a musical instrument.

KC: Yeah, it was to integrate them into the music. I thought that approach would give the soloists more freedom, rather than fencing them in with, “boom, boom, boom, boom.”

Actually, the bottom never changed. I just put it up on the cymbal to kind of ease the weight of the bass drum which I played very softly. It was always four beats, but I would syncopate the bass drum. Whatever accent the band was playing, I would make it, but they could always feel it. I’d just say to the guys, “Put the time in your head and play. Don’t listen for the drums because the drums are not working for you. They’re working for everybody.” The best thing to do was to feel the beat and not listen for it, you know. Once they got it in their heads, then I went upstairs to stay. I played ding-ding-a-ding up there and it gave my left hand freedom to do other things.

It was another way to play. I wasn’t try ing to be hip, but I wanted to make it easier than diggin’ coal all night. I was just figuring it out for me.

ET: What other bands were you able to work with prior to the bebop era?

KC: Claude Hopkins, Teddy Hill. Hill was just beginning to accept my style of playing. But they all still wanted to hear the bass drum. They’d stop playing if they didn’t and there would be all kinds of confusion. I’d say, “Why don’t you just feel it the way I want to play?” They’d say, “No man, we have to know where the beat is.”

ET: What about the bass players?

KC: Most of them were slap bass players until Jimmy Blanton came on with Duke. Sonny Greer’s drumming was mostly for color, more or less. Jimmy carried the pulse. That was his job.

When I started playing up on the cymbal, the bass players would say, “Man, when I hear that bass drum going all the time, I can’t concentrate on my solo. Just play that cymbal.” So I started playing the bass drum real soft and just making accents. The four beats were there, but it was real soft. I still play like that today.

When I played with Oscar Pettiford, I would be in the background going ding-ding-a-ding with a real soft bass drum, and he’d get out in front of that mic’ and shine. He’d say, “Man, just keep that rhythm on the cymbal and that soft bass drum, and everything will be cool.” So I began to practice with just a cymbal—no bass drum. I just played from hand to hand. Oscar would say, “That’s it. That’s what I want!” I had to work with him all the time because no other drummer played like that. Then I started playing it with the big bands. The cats would say, “Yeah man, that’s hip.” I remember one time with Mingus’ band, I sat down and started to play. The whole reed section stood up and said, “Yeah!” So I figured I was on the right track.

ET: Years ago, when I first saw you, you used a big, thick felt beater.

KC: Well, that’s because I was trying to play very soft. I knew if I played soft, I could just say “Boom,” and it would be loud. I didn’t have to go too far to play loud. But if I played, “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM,” there wouldn’t be any accents. The accents would have to be louder and that would mess up the whole band. I’d play soft for the most part, and the accents would come out better.

ET: Your time beat was almost like a straight four, but it wasn’t. It was right on top, almost like a 64th note, or closer, on the second and fourth triplet.

KC: Well, this cat I was telling you about, named Jimmy Peck, he just sat me down and said, “Look, if you’re going to play it up there, make it sound pretty. It’s all in here, in the wrist, and you kind of throw it out.” When you throw it out, it changes the sound. There are so many things you can do when you get the idea.

Actually, a guy named Joe Garland, a tenor player with Edgar Hayes, would write things for me. He’d write out a trumpet part, and he’d leave it up to me to play whatever I felt would be most effective. I’d play the figures over the regular beat. That’s how I first got the idea to play that way. Then I developed the idea further with Roy. Most of the guys who’d played with Roy didn’t do anything with their left hands. Almost everybody was just copying Jo with that hi-hat thing. I was looking for something new. When I started to play that way, the guys in the band would always kid me about not playing the hi-hat like Jo, but I didn’t want to copy anyone. I wanted to be an original.

ET: Could you trace your career after the Minton’s years?

KC: Well, I went on to work with Louie Armstrong, and then Ella Fitzgerald’s band. I spent a year with Benny Carter in 1942, and then I worked with Henry “Red” Allen in Chicago. I came back to New York right after that and went into the Army in 1943. I was in Europe during the war.

When I came out in ’46, I was a little fed up with the music business and I was actually considering doing something else, but that idea didn’t last very long. I went with Dizzy’s band later in ’46 and stayed for a year before joining Tadd Dameron’s band. I went back with Diz in ’48 for a tour of Europe, and I stayed on in Paris after the tour to do some teaching and recording. Then I came back to the United States in ’51 to tour with Billy Eckstine.

ET: Just to backtrack for a moment, didn’t you once spend some time with the great composer, Darius Milhaud, in Paris?

KC: Oh yeah. That was in 1949. A trumpet player by the name of Dick Collins was living in Paris and he was a student of Milhaud. He told him about me and Milhaud wanted to meet me. Well, Dick and I played for him, and he was taking notes. He’d stop us and take notes. Then we’d play again and he’d stop us again. He was very interested in the ride cymbal beat and in what I was doing with my left hand. He really knew a lot about jazz and he was very enthusiastic.

ET: Many people don’t realize it, but you were involved with the original Modern Jazz Quartet before you moved to Europe permanently.

KC: We did that in 1952. That was with John Lewis and Milt Jackson. That was some quartet; made a hell of a racket. It was so beautiful, you know. And Bags, he could hear around the corner. He had the power to do anything he wanted to do.

ET: Before you moved to Paris permanently in 1956, you did a lot of recording in New York.

KC: I did most of the work for Savoy, and I also worked as an A & R man for them. We recorded people like Cannonball, Donald Byrd, Lee Konitz and Lennie Tristano.
I went to Paris in ’56 to work with this big band over there. The band eventually broke up, but I stayed on in Paris. I did some work with Quincy Jones and I worked at this club in a rhythm section that backed up most of the great American jazz players that came through. I also did a lot of studio work. I liked it better over there. It was a peaceful life, and I could always work. I’d always say, “I’m gonna go back home,” but I never got around to it.

ET: In 1960, you were co-leader of the Clarke-Boland Big Band, until it disbanded in ’73. How did that come about?

KC: Oh, that was weird. We started out with a duo—piano and drums—just Francy [Boland] and me. Gigi Gryce had an ice cream parlour in Cologne, and he would clear the tables in one part of the place so Francy and I could play. Then, Jimmy Wood came in, and he looked up and didn’t see any bass. So he went out and got his bass. Then we had a trio. And that’s the way it went. The band just kept growing and growing.

Then some cat from Blue Note came over and we recorded it. We were eight pieces at the time. Well, the record sold so well that we decided to make another one with 13 pieces. We added the saxes and we started recording again. Gigi would record everything when we got together. We did the Jazz Is Universal album with 13 pieces, and it turned out pretty fair.

ET: That was an international band, wasn’t it?

KC: Oh, yeah. We just picked cats up from everywhere.

ET: You had two drummers there for a while; you and Kenny Clare.

KC: Well, what happened there was, I had an engagement in Morocco for the Moroccan Red Cross, and I had booked it months in advance. Gigi had a transcription date in Cologne, so Ronnie Scott said, “I’ve got a good drummer to bring in. He can fill in for Klook.” So they brought in Kenny Clare. When I got back from Morocco, they played the tapes for me and I said, “When did I do that? I don’t remember doing that.” It sounded like me all through the thing; sounded like everything I did. They said, “Kenny Clare did that while you were away.” I said, “Who is this guy? Bring him over.” There was no use in him being over there and me being here when we played alike. So we brought him to Cologne and tried a couple of tunes. He would always follow me. He’d say, “Klook, you’re the leader.” When I’d take sticks, he’d take brushes. He didn’t want to get in the way.

ET: He’s very simpatico, isn’t he?

KC: He’s a great drummer—a fantastic player.

ET: It’s very difficult to get two drummers synchronized properly in one band.
KC: Well, we started getting things together, you know. We’d play different patterns, because if we both played them, it would be too pronounced. But we figured out the patterns and it worked out.

ET: I’d like to touch on your activity in education for a moment. I have the original series of books that you and Dante Augustini collaborated on. Both of you worked seven years on developing the Dante Augustini Methods, didn’t you?

KC: Yeah. I had the ideas and he had the bread. He paid for everything. He was very quick with transcribing. He could write almost as fast as you could play. Then we’d go over it and see if everything was correct. He had all these connections and a printer. He knew everybody, so he took care of all that.

ET: You know, I’m still working with these things. It’s such a wealth of stuff.

KC: Unlike most syncopation studies, everything swings so hard; there’s so much stuff that just swings. We even had the things we worked out with drumset choirs.

ET: I’ve written some suites off some of the things you’ve done in those books with five or six drummers. I understand that he had things with up to 15 drummers.

KC: Yeah. We’d check out the best students— the hippest students. Dante would be on one side and I’d be on the other to kind of keep things together. It was beautiful, man.
Some cat from television caught wind of it, and he called to ask if we would do something on one of the big shows. So, we picked out the best students who could really make it, and we did a hell of a TV show. People were asking, “When are those drummers coming back?”

ET: Well the things are so musical. It’s amazing what you can do with drums; the limitless possibilities. What’s your feeling on technique as it relates to musicality?

KC: I always tell people, don’t slough off the technique. I mean, it’s important, but only when you need it. You don’t really need a whole lot of technique to play drums. As far as soloing goes, if you hum the melody, the solo will come to you automatically.

You have to learn how to use your technique and how to apply it to the music. It’s like those people who walk into a million dollars. Okay, you’ve got a million dollars. Now, your next problem is you have to learn how to spend it wisely. It’s the same thing in music. You’ve got this technique, but you have to learn how to use it in places where it’s going to sound beautiful. You don’t just put it anywhere. You pick your spots.

ET: That takes a great deal of discipline.

KC: Yeah, that’s right. But if you get the stuff down to where you play it at the right time, then it comes out beautiful. But, if you mix it in with everything, the people get tired of listening to it. It’s not supposed to be like that. My idea of a drum solo is that you play like you sing. It comes from different things you listen to. And the beauty is always in the simple things.

I see young musicians with all kinds of equipment up there who hardly know how to play half of it. If you’re going to take all the stuff, then learn how to use it all. I never used more than two cymbals throughout my entire career.

Most young drummers I hear play too much. I say, just play what’s required of you; whatever’s necessary for that piece of music. Don’t overdo it. You have to be sensitive to the situation you’re in at the moment. If you really know your instrument, you can fit in with anybody.

ET: What’s your feeling about how the drums have evolved over the past 40 years or so?
KC: Well, the innovators always change the direction. Jo, Max, then Elvin, and then Tony Williams turned everything completely around. Now Jack DeJohnette is going on even further.

If you can reach a point where you can say, “Yeah, I found it,” then you’ll be able to show someone what you’re doing. You have to come to some conclusion. It’s like writing a piece of music. It has to have an ending. You can write a million pages, but it has to come to a conclusion. At some point, you have to say, “Well, this is what I’ve reached; this is my conclusion.” Then somebody can take it out and say, “Okay, let’s look over it.” Not that you’re running back every ten minutes saying, “Yeah, but I got this too.” No man, this is what you’ve contributed. Now give us a chance to study it and figure it out. Then you can go on further with it, because now we know what you’re doing.

You have to bring it all together, make one thing out of it, and come to some con clusions about what this is supposed to do and what that’s supposed to do. Don’t just wander out in the fields, searching and searching. Put it all together and draw some conclusions. You put it all in the sack and go on to work, you know. But, if the cats keep “jig-jagging” around, they will never get to the idea of why they’re doing it.

My idea was to make drumming easier for me. I didn’t like the way other drummers were playing. I wanted to be able to say, “Look, this is the way I play. Here it is.” I had to get it down to fine points, and it took a lot of work. I wanted something I could use all the time, no matter where I was, so I could do my gig. That’s what I was working on—something for me—something conclusive.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2014/01/08/260769892/the-drummer-who-invented-jazzs-basic-beat

A Blog Supreme

From NPR Jazz

A Blog Supreme

The Drummer Who Invented Jazz's Basic Beat

January 9, 2014

by Michael J. West

National Public Radio

NPR

Kenny Clarke performs at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1968. He spent the second half of his career in Europe. JazzSign/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/09/261051016/kenny-clarke-inventor-of-modern-jazz-drumming-at-100

Music

Kenny Clarke, Inventor Of Modern Jazz Drumming, At 100

January 9, 2014

Heard on Fresh Air

NPR

by Kevin Whitehead

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Kenny Clarke in 1971

January 9, 2014 marks the 100th birthday of drummer Kenny Clarke. One of the founders of bebop, Clarke is less well-known than allies like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, but his influence is just as deep.

That thing that jazz drummers do — that ching-chinga-ching beat on the ride cymbal, like sleigh bells? It gives the music a light, airy, driving pulse. Clarke came up with that, and that springy shimmer came to epitomize swinging itself.

Before him, jazz drummers kept time lightly on the bass drum. Kenny Clarke used bass drum sparingly, often tethered to his snare, for dramatic accents in odd places — what jazz folk call "dropping bombs." He drew on his playing for stage shows, where drummers punctuate the action with split-second timing. Clarke kicked a band along.

With those twin innovations, Kenny Clarke invented modern jazz drumming. His fleet new style had begun to evolve in the late 1930s, alongside other new developments that would blossom into bebop. The very fast tempos were easier to handle on ride cymbal than bass drum, and all the crazy accents let him do more with less. Plus, string bass' role was expanding, and Clarke wanted his bass drum out of its way. He explored his jittery new phrasing during legendary sessions at Minton's in Harlem in the early '40s, with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and guitarist Charlie Christian.

Clarke was drafted in 1943, and was still in uniform two years later when the first bebop records got cut in New York. His absence from those early bop sessions is one reason he never quite got his due. But he made up for lost time after the war. While Clarke was away, bebop had broken through as jazz's next wave. In trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's 1946 big band, everyone had mastered those tricky new rhythms, as in "Things to Come."

Gillespie's four-piece rhythm section with Milt Jackson on vibes eventually became the Modern Jazz Quartet; they were quite successful, but also too sedate for Kenny Clarke, who quit in 1955. He just wanted to swing in any setting, and not just using cymbals. He got the same smooth continuity with brushes on snare, and had plenty of other techniques and colors at hand. Clarke was known for the beautiful sound he coaxed from the drums, and singers adored the lift he gave them. (He backed his ex-wife Carmen McRae on her 1954 debut.)

Kenny Clarke recorded a lot in the early '50s, with Miles and Monk and Mingus and many more, but he craved a change. He'd always gotten a warm reception in France as a GI or visiting musician, and he resettled in Paris in 1956. That second, much longer absence from the U.S. cost him more recognition. But he worked steadily, sometimes with other expats like Dexter Gordon, Don Byas, Bud Powell or Sidney Bechet. For 11 years, he and pianist-composer Francy Boland co-led the Clarke-Boland Big Band that made plenty of room for their crack international soloists — and for the drums.

Clarke stayed in France, made a family there and taught a lot of students. He recorded less often in his final decade, after a 1975 heart attack. On one of his last sessions, in New York in 1983, he made up a percussion quartet with avant-garde drummers Andrew Cyrille, Milford Graves and Famadou Don Moye. To the end, Kenny Clarke stayed open to new possibilities for the drums.

https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608003101/Kenny-Clarke.html

Find Kenny Clarke on Amazon.com

Born on January 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh, PA; died on January 26, 1985, in Paris, France.

In The Jazz Exiles, Bill Moody called Kenny Clarke "the man who changed the course of jazz drumming." In MusicHound Jazz, Clarke is described as "probably the most important figure in the transition from swing to early bebop drumming." In any survey of jazz from the 1940s through the 1960s, Clarke is omnipresent: he is at New York's legendary Minton's Playhouse, fomenting bebop alongside Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker; he is present ten years later at the Birth of the Cool recording sessions, shifting bebop into more formal structures alongside Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet. In the late 1950s he joined the mass emigration of jazz musicians to Paris, joining such luminaries as Bud Powell and Dexter Gordon. Clarke's name appears as composer on two of the most famous tunes in jazz: Monk's "Epistrophy" and Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts."

Kenny Clarke is probably the most famous jazzman the public has never heard of. Unlike his friend and rival Max Roach, Clarke cultivated anonymity. As quoted in Scott DeVeaux's Birth of Bebop, Clarke once told an interviewer: "I always concentrated on accompaniment. I thought that was the most important thing, my basic function as a drummer, and so I always stuck with that. And I think that's why a lot of the musicians liked me so much, because I never show off and always think about them first." While Clarke's drumming made him a perfect accompanist to the likes of Gillespie and Parker, it stood out like a sore thumb in the swing bands he played with early on in his career. A widely circulated story told in DeVeaux's book has a trumpeter for Teddy Hill's big band complaining to the bandleader, "Man, we can't use [Clarke] because he breaks up the time too much." Clarke was fired shortly thereafter.

It wasn't that Clarke couldn't keep time; indeed, he had been a reliable swing drummer all his life. Clarke was born on January 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While details of his early life are scarce, it is known that he studied all manner of instruments in high school, from the vibraphone to the piano. He got his start playing drums in local big bands as a teenager, eventually graduating to the touring bands of Roy Eldridge and Lonnie Simmons, both 1935, Claude Hopkins, and the Edgar Hayes Big Band, which gave Clarke his first recording session and the first of many trips to Europe. But swing drumming consisted mainly of pounding out a 4/4 beat on the bass drum, adding the occasional accent on the cymbals. Clarke was searching for something new and was constantly engaged in behind-the-scenes experimentation. He told Nat Hentoff, editor of Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: "I was trying to make the drums more musical instead of just a dead beat ... with the drums as a real participating instrument with its own voice."

When Clarke joined Hill's band in 1939, he encountered a kindred spirit in fellow bandmate Dizzy Gillespie: "[Gillespie] got into everything!" Clarke told Down Beat. "He couldn't stay still; the man always was reaching out. I'd write out little things and hand them back to my man--Diz always sat right behind the drums. He would play them; then we'd play them together. We had the fire. There was an excitement inside us; we knew we were moving into something." One day, the dam finally burst, and Clarke inadvertently arrived at a rhythmic innovation, as quoted in The Birth of Bebop: "It just happened sort of accidentally....We were playing a real fast tune once with Teddy Hill-- 'Old Man River,' I think--and the tempo was too fast to play four beats to the measure, so I began to cut the time up. But to keep the same rhythm going, I had to do it with my hand, because my foot just wouldn't do it.... So then I began to think, and say, 'Well, you know, it worked. It worked and nobody said anything, so it came out right. So that must be the way to do it.'"

In other words, Clarke began keeping time on the ride cymbal and using the bass drum to provide accents, a practice that became known as "dropping bombs." Keeping time on the cymbal gave the music a much brighter, lighter, more propulsive feel. But Clarke's use of the bass drum was equally revolutionary. It wasn't just that he was using it for accents, it was where he was placing those accents. He dropped bombs to fill in gaps in the brass phrasing and to spur on soloists--nothing could have been further from the staid rhythmic style of big band swing. It was those accents, which Hill called "kloop-mop," that earned Clarke the nickname "Klook."

Although Hill fired Clarke, he respected him, and when his own big band failed in 1940, Hill hired Clarke to lead the band at the down-and-out Harlem nightclub called Minton's Playhouse. According to DeVeaux, Hill told Clarke: "Now Kenny, I'm managing this place. I want you to be the bandleader. You can drop all the bombs, all the re-bop and the boom-bams you want to play, you can do it here." The first musician Clarke hired was a then-unknown pianist named Thelonious Monk, and thus the bebop movement was born.

The jazz scene in New York in the early 1940s was studded with after-hours clubs, mostly in Harlem, where big-band musicians would go after gigs. At the clubs they would engage in "jam sessions" or "cutting contests," seeking both to prove and improve their instrumental skills. Given Monk and Clarke's peculiar rhythmic and harmonic predilections, the scene at Minton's rapidly became a laboratory for the new style. In Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns's Jazz: A History of America's Music, guitarist Danny Barker describes the first time he heard Clarke and Monk playing together: "Monk started. Klook fell in, dropped in, dived in, sneaked in; by hook or by crook, he was in.... You would look, hear the off-, off-, off-beat explosion and think 'fireworks,' and then the color patterns formed in the high sky of your mind."

But the new musicians had no name for what they were doing; they simply called it "playing modern." As the movement began to build, audiences became more and more familiar with the opening count. In Jazz Gillespie is quoted as saying that for most tunes, "we just wrote an intro and a first chorus. I'd say 'Dee-da-pa-da-n-de-bop.' And we'd go into it. People, when they'd want to ask for one of those numbers and didn't know the name, would ask for 'bebop.'" As bebop caught on, Clarke's looser, more "modern" style began to affect drumming as a whole. Suddenly more conventional gigs were opening up, and Clarke played with Louis Armstrong and His Big Band and behind such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, and Coleman Hawkins.

In 1943 Clarke was drafted into the Army, which brought him back to Europe, where he met future collaborator John Lewis. By the time he returned to New York in 1946, bop and its self-appointed spokesperson Dizzy Gillespie were famous; the music had become a national movement, and change was once again afoot. In a midtown basement, Gil Evans was conducting a jazz laboratory of his own, one that attempted to harness the harmonic and rhythmic energy of bebop to more formal, classical structures. In Jazz, Miles Davis, a regular at Evans's sessions, is quoted as saying "Bird [Charlie Parker] and Diz were great, [but] if you weren't a fast listener you couldn't catch the humor or feeling of their music. Their music wasn't sweet and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss." Evans and Davis and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan were striving for a more balanced feel, where the soloists would somehow be integrated with the ensemble, and the ensemble playing would have the freedom and eloquence of soloing. The outcome of these sessions was the Miles Davis Nonet, which in 1949 recorded the classic Birth of the Cool, with Kenny Clarke playing drums. Cool Jazz, a bebop movement characterized above all by its restraint and formal sophistication, had been born; once again, Kenny Clarke was there.

He was there, too, at the birth of another exemplar of Cool Jazz, the Modern Jazz Quartet. In 1948 Clarke had gone on tour with Gillespie's big band, which, like Evans's, was struggling to find a way to integrate formal ensemble structures with the vibrancy of bebop. The effort left Gillespie's trumpeters so exhausted that halfway through the set, drummer Clarke, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown, and pianist John Lewis would play together for 15 minutes as a sort of intermission. After leaving the big band, the four stayed together as the Milt Jackson Quartet, playing Lewis's careful, contrapuntal arrangements. The four decided early on to abandon the concept of a bandleader, and they changed their name to the Modern Jazz Quartet. They were as far as could be from the hepcat, bohemian image of the jazz musician: they played sober, they wore tuxedos onstage. While musicians like Parker were giving their compositions primitivist titles like "KoKo" or "Ri-Bop," Lewis wrote tunes with arty, European-sounding titles like "Vendome." Ted Gioia has noted in his History of Jazz that the Modern Jazz Quartet is the "quintessential cool band remarkable for its longevity and popularity, as well as its consistently high musical standards," but by 1955, Clarke had had enough.

Indeed, he had had enough of life in the States, period. He told Zwerin, "Economically everything was all right, but there was something I had to clear up in my mind. You know people look for different things in life, but all I wanted was peace and quiet--and money." He told Mike Zwerin of the Culturekiosque website that he began turning down gigs: "Miles [Davis] knocked on my door, so I told the little girl I was with to tell him I'm out. He just kept knocking, said 'Klook, Klook, I know you're in there.' I just didn't feel like going on that gig. I'd been recording for Savoy Records almost every day. I was tired, man." Unsure of what to do, Clarke moved to Paris, the city he had fallen in love with in 1939 while touring with the Edgar Hayes Big Band. He was not alone. Dexter Gordon had already moved there, Stan Getz and Bud Powell would do so shortly. Paris was a city legendary for its love of American jazz.

When Down Beat's Burt Korall travelled to Paris to interview Clarke in 1963, the drummer had only good things to say about his adoptive country. Clarke's exile did not separate him from other American jazz musicians, who traveled through Paris frequently. With pianist Powell and French bassist Pierre Michelot, Clarke founded the Three Bosses, who backed legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon on his classic Blue Note recording Our Man in Paris. The Down Beat interview, however, also revealed a deepening conservatism, expressed in criticism of such next-generation jazzmen as John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. This conservatism was perhaps also expressed by Clarke's return to the music he grew up on: swing. In 1960 he co-founded the Clarke-Boland Big Band with arranger Francy Boland. Conservative though it may have been, according to Zwerin, they "created some of the fattest, most swinging big band sounds ever, and almost single-handedly kept the genre in the public's ears--at least the European public." Clarke died on January 26, 1985, in Paris, France; as Moody puts it in Jazz Exiles, Clarke had become "an elder statesman for the ... jazz exiles."

by David Levine

Kenny Clarke's Career

Played drums in touring big bands as a teen; played with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian as bandleader at Minton's Playhouse, beginning 1940; played on classic Birth of the Coolsessions with the Miles Davis Nonet, 1949; founded Modern Jazz Quartet with John Lewis and Milt Jackson, 1951; emigrated to Paris, formed Three Bosses with American pianist Bud Powell and French bassist Pierre Michelot, 1955; Three Bosses recorded classic Our Man in Paris behind Dexter Gordon, 1963; co-founded Clarke-Boland Big Band with Belgian arranger Francy Boland, 1960.

Famous Works

Selected discography
Solo
Klook's Clique , Savoy, 1955; reissued, 1988.
Telefunken Blues , Savoy, 1955; reissued, 1993.
Bohemia after Dark , Savoy, 1956; reissued, 1996.
Clarke-Boland Big Band , Atlantic, 1963; reissued, Koch International, 2000.
With the Modern Jazz Quartet
The Artistry of the Modern Jazz Quartet , Prestige, 1952-55; reissued, 1986.
With others
(Miles Davis) Birth of the Cool , Capitol, 1949-50; reissued, 2001.
(Dexter Gordon) Our Man in Paris , Blue Note, 1963; reissued, 1987.

Kenny “Klook” Clarke

Kenny Clarke emerged from the swing bands of the ’30s, but was actually the first important drummer of the bop era. Born in Pittsburgh in 1914, Clarke began his career with Roy Eldridge and around the Midwest with the Jeter-Pillars band. He made his first recordings with Edgar Hayes in 1937, and later worked with Claude Hopkins, Teddy Hill, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Benny Carter.

Following his army discharge, Clarke returned to New York to join Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, where he made numerous recordings on which we can hear the first indications of drumming based on the use of the bass drum for accents, the timekeeping function shifting over to the ride cymbal, and the left hand interacting with the soloist. In essence, Kenny Clarke was freeing the drummer from a strictly metronomic role, allowing him the opportunity for more creative interplay, and forcing the bass player to share more of the timekeeping burden.

Kenny Clarke recalled experimenting with a new style of drumming as early as 1940 at Minton’s in New York. It was here where his rhythmic ideas meshed with the thinking of young boppers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Thelonius Monk, and Charlie Parker.

“By 1940, I had everything I was trying to do together,” said Clarke. “Before that, I was always thinking, ‘There must be an easier, simpler way to keep the band together.’ I thought about it for many years. I was still playing the old way, but once in a while I’d do that cymbal thing: ding-ding-a-ding. I figured you could hear the time better than on the snare drum. The bottom never changed. I just put the time up on the cymbal to ease the weight of the bass drum. I’d tell the guys to put the time in their heads and play. Once they got it in their heads, I went upstairs to stay. I played the time up there, and it gave my left hand the freedom to do other things.”

Later in his career, Clarke worked on 52nd Street with Tadd Dameron’s sextet, where his relaxed style was a modern extension of the feeling Jo Jones had achieved with the Basie band. His playing had become a synthesis of previous approaches, most notably the ride cymbal of Jo Jones, the unpredictable, explosive solos of Sid Catlett, and the timbral variations of Baby Dodds.

Clarke continued to freelance around New York with important modernists, and in 1952 was instrumental in the formation of the legendary Modern Jazz Quartet. In 1956, he left for Paris, where he took up residence and remained until his death in 1985. More than any player who had come before, Kenny Clarke gave jazz drummers an opportunity to fully express themselves, unleashing the chains that had bound them up to that point. His unique concepts would eventually impact on every jazz drummer the world over.

http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2019/05/klook-kenny-clarke-and-beginnings-of.html

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Klook: Kenny Clarke and The Beginnings of Modern Jazz Drumming

How did the Jazz world get from Gene Krupa to Philly Joe Jones?

The answer to that question is as central as asking how it got from Benny Goodman to Charlie Parker, or from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie or from Earl “Fatha” Hines to Bud Powell or from Jimmy Blanton to Charlie Mingus.

Melodically and harmonically, Parker, Gillespie, Powell and Mingus created the basic musical structures of modern Jazz.

Kenny Clarke who acquired the nickname of “Klook-mop” which was later shortened to “Klook” created the rhythmic foundation over which the convoluted and fast moving Bebop lines - melodies- could ride unimpeded by the thump-thump-thump of the swing drum beat with its heavily accented 4-beats to the bar bass drum beat.

[Klook-mop was derived from the sound of the snare-to-bass-drum chatter that early Bebop drummers played behind the ride cymbal beat.]

Kenny’s modern style of drumming seemed to spring forth as a fully formed conception during the early jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse from about 1941 onwards.

In fact, Kenny was piecing his approach together over a four year period from about 1937-1941.

In probing for the sources of modern jazz styles, one is not likely to come upon a more influential figure than drummer Kenny Clarke.

Without Clarke's creative drum developments, there is a good possibility that the bebop phase would not have attained its musical importance and gone on to contribute to contemporary jazz forms. Two European critics have succinctly evaluated Clarke's importance. England's Max Harrison: "He built the rhythmic foundation of the new music." France's Andre Hodeir: "His rhythmic imagination has stimulated the melodic genius of others."

More than a decade ago, Max Roach, considered by many the greatest of the modern drummers, pointed out that a drummer should be able to compose, and he mentioned Clarke as an example. Roach said, "Clarke knows his harmony, melody, and has a million ideas." In the 1959 Down Beat drum issue Roach again spoke of his friend as follows: "I've been partial to Clarke. He doesn't borrow; you don't hear the way he plays anywhere else. It's not African or Afro-Cuban; it's unique."

Kenneth Spearman Clarke's conceptual individuality came to the fore early in his career. He was born Jan. 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pa. His father was a trombonist, and Kenny had a younger brother, Frank, who played bass. Kenny studied piano, trombone, drums, vibra-harp, and theory in high school. His knowledge of keyboard harmony, obtained in those early years, was to be an important aspect of his future development.

His first professional job was with Leroy Bradley's Pittsburgh band for about five years. This was followed by a time with the Eldridge brothers, whose home also was in Pittsburgh. Trumpeter Roy had come in from the road about 1933 and with his late brother, Joe, an alto saxophonist and arranger, had formed a home-town band. It worked out well because if Clarke missed a date, Roy could take over on the drums, which he loved to do.

Clarke made his first trip out of town to join the commercial dance band organized by James Jeter and Hayes Pillars during 1934 in St. Louis, Mo. It is interesting to note that both Christian and Blanton served with the Jeter-Pillars Band about that time too.

Early 1937 found Clarke in New York City with Edgar Hayes' big band. He made his first recording, with Hayes, in March, 1937, and was to record regularly with the band on Decca for more than a year.

One interesting 78-rpm that they made was Decca 1882, Star Dust and In the Mood. It was Hayes' version of Star Dust, performed at a slow to medium tempo, that revived the Hoagy Carmichael song, first recorded in 1927, and started it to the top of the hit list. The reverse side, written by saxophonist Joe Garland, then with the Hayes band, went along for the ride, no one paying it much notice. Two years later Glenn Miller's Bluebird record of In the Mood made it a best-seller.

While on tour in Europe (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland) during early 1938 with Hayes, Clarke made some quintet sides in Stockholm under his own name.

This Hayes band was a forward-looking swing aggregation. Clarinetist Rudy Powell did some arrangements for the group, and several years later, young Dizzy Gillespie was to mention he was interested in Powell's work. The band recorded quite a few swinging originals such as Stomping at the Renny (Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem).

Tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, while with Earl Hines in 1937, has recalled a battle of bands Hines had with Hayes in Dayton, Ohio. At that time, Johnson said, he noticed some unusual drumming by Clarke.

Clarke himself has said, "I was trying to make the drums more musical. Garland would write out trumpet parts for me to read, and I would use my discretion in playing things that I thought would be effective. These were rhythm patterns superimposed over the regular beat."

After returning from Europe, the drummer and Powell joined the long-established Claude Hopkins Band. Clarke stayed eight months with Hopkins and then went with the Teddy Hill Band, in which he first met Gillespie.

By this time Clarke was well along in evolving a style of his own. The Hayes, Hopkins, and Hill bands played frequently at the Savoy Ballroom. Clarke has said it wore him out trying to keep up the fast tempos required.

One of the numbers in the Hill repertoire that he gives as an example was The Harlem Twister (also known as Sensation Stomp).

To get relief, Clarke fell back on experiments he had been making with his top cymbal. He developed a technique whereby he transferred his timekeeping chore from the bass drum to the top cymbal, riding it with his right hand. His right foot was then free to play off-beat accents on the bass drum, a sort of punctuating function to become known as "bombs." He devoted his left stick to the snare drum, sometimes using it for accents and other times using it to help the cymbal carry the rhythm.

All this confused leader Hill, and Clarke was fired, but he was in the band long enough to make an impression on Gillespie. The trumpeter said he found it stimulating to improvise around Clarke's off-rhythms.

From the Hill band Clarke followed Panama Francis into Roy Eldridge's big band at the Arcadia Ballroom on Broadway. None of these bands — Hopkins, Hill, Eldridge — recorded while Clarke was with them.

In the summer of 1940 Clarke was working with Sidney Bechet's quartet at the Log Cabin in Fonda, N.Y. During the fall of that year Teddy Hill took over the management at Minton's and asked Clarke and trumpeter Joe Guy to bring in a small group. The astute Hill wanted to make the spot a hangout for musicians, and in this setting he was sympathetic to Clarke's experiments. Hill said the drummer's unique figures sounded to him like "kloop" or "klook," and he told Clarke they could play all the "klook-mop music" they wanted at Minton's. I guess it followed naturally that Clarke became known as Klook.

Several writers in discussing the Jerry Newman acetates made in May, 1941, at Minton's have pointed out that actually the only suggestion of the things to come emanated from Clarke's drums. Marshall Stearns, in mentioning the Newman sides in his Story of Jazz, said, ". . . drummer Clark is playing fully matured bop drums."

Clarke worked with Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie in developing unusual chord changes. The drummer has a long list of original compositions registered with Broadcast Music, Inc., including Klook Returns; Blues Mood; Roll 'Em, Bags; I’ll Get You Yet.

Before he left for the service in 1943, Clarke was a regular at Minton's when in town. During that period he spent a short time in Louis Armstrong's big band, from which he was soon fired, and Armstrong begged Big Sid Catlett to return; five weeks with Gillespie in Ella Fitzgerald's orchestra, which the two joined together and from which they were fired together; Benny Carter's sextet on 52nd St.; and a comparatively long run with Red Allen's small band at the Downbeat Room in Chicago.

At the time Clarke went into service, the new music had not as yet acquired the name bebop. Like Charlie Parker, he was later to disapprove of the appellation and attendant jargon heartily.

For those with a taste for discography, you can hear Kenny evolving the modern style of Jazz drumming on the following recordings, assuming you can find them!

New York City, March 9, 1937

Edgar Hayes and His Orchestra—Bernie Flood, Henry Goodwin, Shelton Hemphill, trumpets; Bob Horton, Clyde Bernhardt, John Haughton, trombones; Stanley Palmar, Al Sherrett, Crawford Wetherington, Joe Garland, saxophones; Hayes, piano; Andy Jackson, guitar; Elmer James, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums. MANHATTAN JAM (201)

..........Variety 586, Vocalion 3773

Stockholm, Sweden, March 8, 1938

Kenny Clarke's Quintet — Goodwin, trumpet; Rudy Powell, clarinet; Hayes, piano; George Gibb, guitar; Coco Darling, bass; Clarke, drums, vibraharp; John Clay Anderson, vocals. ONCE IN A WHILE (6317)

..............Swedish Odeon 255509

I FOUND A NEW BABY (6318).........

..............Swedish Odeon 255509

YOU'RE A SWEETHEART (6319)

..............Swedish Odeon 255510

SWEET SUE (6320)

..............Swedish Odeon 255510

New York City, Feb. 5, 1940

Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers—Bechet, soprano saxophone, clarinet, vocal; Sonny White, piano; Charlie Howard, guitar; Wilson Myers, bass, vocal; Clarke, drums. INDIAN SUMMER (46832). .Bluebird 10623 ONE O'CLOCK JUMP (46833)

.................RCA Victor 27204

PREACHIN' BLUES (46834)

.....................Bluebird 10623

SIDNEY'S BLUES (46835).. .Bluebird 8509

New York City, May 15, 1940

Mildred Bailey and Her Orchestra— Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Robert Burns, Jimmy Carroll, clarinets; Irving Horowitz, bass clarinet; Ed Powell, flute; Mitch Miller, oboe; Teddy Wilson, piano; John Collins, guitar; Pete Peterson, bass; Clarke, drums; Miss Bailey, vocals. How CAN I EVER BE ALONE?

(27302).............Columbia 35532

TENNESSEE FISH FRY (27303)

....................Columbia 35532

I'LL PRAY FOR You (27304)

....................Columbia 35589

BLUE AND BROKEN HEARTED (27305)

....................Columbia 25589

New York City, Sept. 12, 1940

Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra—Eldridge, trumpet; Georgie Auld, Don Redman, alto saxophones; Don By as, Jimmy Hamilton, tenor saxophones; Wilson, piano; Collins, guitar; Al Hall, bass; Clarke, drums; Miss Holiday, vocals. I'M ALL FOR You (28617)

................Okeh-Vocalion 5831

I HEAR Music (28618)

................Okeh-Vocalion 5831

THE SAME OLD STORY (28619)

......Okeh-Vocalion 5806, V Disc 586

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT (28620)

.................Okeh-Vocalion 5806

New York City, March 11, 1941

Slim Gaillard and His Flat Foot Floogie Boys—Loumell Morgan, piano; Gaillard, guitar, vocals; Slam Stewart, bass; Clarke, drums.

AH Now (29913)...........Okeh 6295

A TIP ON THE NUMBERS (29914)

.........................Okeh 6135

SLIM SLAM BOOGIE (29915).. .Okeh 6135

BASSOLOGY (29916)..........Okeh 6295

New York City, March 21, 1941

Eddie Heywood and His Orchestra— Shad Collins, trumpet; Leslie Johnakins, Eddie Barefield, alto saxophones; Lester Young, tenor saxophone; Heywood, piano; Collins, guitar; Ted Sturgis, bass; Clarke, drums; Miss Holiday, vocals.

LET'S Do IT (29987)........Okeh 6134,

Columbia 30235, CL 6129, Blue Ace 206 GEORGIA ON MY MIND (29988)

Okeh 6134, Columbia 30235, C3L-21, Blue Ace 206, Jolly Roger 5020 ROMANCE IN THE DARK (29989)

........Okeh 6214, Columbia C3L-21,

Blue Ace 205, Jolly Roger 5020

ALL OF ME (29990)

.......Okeh 6214, Columbia CL 6129,

C3L-21, Blue Ace 205

New York City, May 8, 1941

Minton House Band (with guests)— Joe Guy, Hot Lips Page, trumpets; Ker-mit Scott, Don Byas, tenor saxophones; Thelonious Monk, piano; Charlie Christian, guitar; Nick Fenton, bass; Clarke, drums. UP ON TEDDY'S HILL (HONEYSUCKLE

ROSE) ...............Esoteric ESJ-4,

Counterpoint 548 DOWN ON TEDDY'S HILL (STOMPING

AT THE SAVOY).........Esoteric ESJ-4

New York City, May 12, 1941

Same, except Scott, Byas, and Page are out. ^CHARLIE'S CHOICE (TOPSY)

.......Vox album 302, Esoteric ESJ-1,

Counterpoint 548 STOMPING AT THE SAVOY

......Vox album 302, Esoteric ESJ-1,

Counterpoint 548

* SWING TO BOP is the title on the Esoteric and Counterpoint LPs.

New York City, June 2, 1941

Count Basie and His Orchestra—Ed Lewis, Buck Clayton, Al Killian, Harry Edison, trumpets; Dicky Wells, Dan Minor, Ed Cuffey, trombones; Earl Warren, Jack Washington, Tab Smith, alto saxophones; Don Byas, Buddy Tate, tenor saxophones; Basic, piano; Freddie Green, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Clarke, drums. You BETCHA MY LIFE (30520)

.........................Okeh 6221

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN (30521)

.........................Okeh 6221

New York City, Oct. 6, 1941

Ella Fitzgerald—Teddy McRae, tenor saxophone; Tommy Fulford, piano; Ulysses Livingston, guitar; Beverly Peer, bass; Clarke, drums; Miss Fitzgerald, vocals.

JIM (69784)...............Decca 4007

THIS LOVE OF MINE (69785). .Decca 4007

Source:

Downbeat Magazine

March 28, 1963

https://www.nationaljazzarchive.org.uk/explore/interviews/1277634-the-kenny-clarke-francy-boland-big-band-article-1?q=kenny%20clarke

The Kenny Clarke - Francy Boland Big Band:

Interview Transcription

The Kenny Clarke /Francy Boland Big Band claims (through its most eloquent mouthpiece Gigi Campi) to play “any music that is in the spirit of jazz.” It is a pretty wide definition and one that will not offend even those musicians obsessed with the fear of being categorised.

Reports from Tony Brown and Kenny Graham in 1968 about the big jazz band.

by Tony Brown

Source: Jazz Professional

KENNY CLARKE AND FRANCY BOLAND

Kenny Clarke we all know about—a drummer who has carved his own place in jazz history. Pianist Francy Boland is a much more mysterious figure—a product of the Royal Conservatoire, Liege, Belgium, whose work was brought to the notice of Count Basie and Benny Goodman by pianist Mary Lou Williams. Francy went to America to arrange for them and for Herman and Gillespie and (we may assume) assimilated plenty.

Boland returned to Europe in 1957. Gigi Campi had been losing his shirt running his own recording company and promoting jazz tours. On Lee Konitz’s dates alone he dropped 10,000 dollars. As Francy arrived, Gigi gave up. But he vowed that if he ever tried again he would find himself a good rhythm section. And here they were—Boland, the great Kenny Clarke (he had just settled in Paris) and bassist Jimmy Woode, who left Ellington to emigrate to Sweden and finished up, like so many at that time, in Paris.

Says Campi: “It was a fantastic section. I knew the moment I heard them together that one day I would start a big band. Then Kurt Edelhagen came to Cologne and played some of the arrangements Francy had written for Basie . . . ” 40–year–old Gigi Campi was born in Cologne of an Italian father and a German mother. (He is based on the city and owns an ice–cream parlour there.) (Cologne had its traditional Carnival and Gigi did not dig carnival time. “Junk music,” he says scathingly.

“So I put on jazz and my place was filled with people who didn’t like the old stuff, either. We gave them Lucky Thompson, Ben Webster, Don Byas, Charlie Shavers—always backed by groups that I put together.” Kenny Clarke was visiting Cologne and listening to Francy Boland’s writing, since Francy was then chief arranger for Kurt Edelhagen.

Gigi set up an octet recording for Blue Note—“The Golden Eight.” Throughout one night, the octet recorded the whole album—“Difficult music”, observes Campi. “In Kenny Clarke’s opinion, it was the best group of its kind that has been recorded in the past ten years.” The pieces were falling into

place.

American vocalist Billie Poole was in Cologne in 1961 to open the Storyville Club and wanted to do an album backed by Francy. Riverside agreed to buy the tapes. The studio and musicians were booked—and at the last moment Billie was called back to America by a bereavement. Rather than cancel the session, they decided to record the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band.

How to describe the KC/FB Big Band’s identity? “We are, in a sense, a Resistance band”, says Gigi. “We are shocking people with our music—trying to awaken them. Not with so–called New Sounds. There is nothing new in the sense of tradition. We don’t try to be avant garde. In my opinion, Francy is the only man who really harmonises when he is scoring. The sounds and the colour are between the lines, as it were.” There are others who will confirm that it has the genuine stuff of Protest. Trombonist Nat Peck has played with the band since its inception. “It’s a protest against a situation that has come on big bands of late,” he says. “A lot of people are using bands as a mere projection of their own personality, forgetting the important role that the individual musicians play in an orchestra. It’s no longer Ake Persson on trombone and Benny Bailey on trumpet, but a trumpet and a trombone. An arranger writes a piece of music and it is full of traps and tricks and dynamics. The musicians are so involved with the technical performance that they are handcuffed. They can take no liberties with the music. They are restrained to such a degree that all the warmth and the electricity is lost.” (Click the picture to enlarge.)

Boland, says Peck, has such an understanding of what musicians are, what they mean. Maybe, he concedes, the band has gone to the other extreme—because there is a conflict between the two attitudes. “I’ve heard some people say: ‘Yes, it’s a good band—but there are no dynamics’. Jiggs Whigham sat in while he was working with Edelhagen. ‘Funny band’, he remarked. ‘No dynamics!’ ‘Yes there are’, I said. ‘One is loud, the other is louder’.” Both Nat Peck and Kenny Clare make the point that the music they are called upon to play is very difficult. Says Kenny: “It is going to sound exaggerated, I know, but Francy really writes for the players. He pushes them. Like, he wrote one note for Nat, all on his own; he knew just how Nat would play that note, and it had to be played by Nat—nobody else.

“The whole thing is like that. He writes to make Benny Bailey sound as good as he does. If Benny sounds so good, he is being given room.” They say that they have had some very good lead players in for odd dates. Benny couldn’t break his regular Munich schedule with the Max Greger band to play Lugano so Snooky Young was booked. “He’s one of the finest lead trumpet players in the world—but it wasn’t the same. Yet Don Menza walked right into the band and made it.” The determination to get the right man produced one odd result. For one date they planned a really big band— five trombones and six trumpets. They had to find a bass trombonist and nobody could come up with one. Then Ake Persson came to see Nat Peck. “I’ve got him,” he said. “Listen to this record.” It was a Gil Evans album and there was this fantastic bass trombonist. There was the name on the cover—Keg Johnson. Excitedly, they called Gigi in Cologne. “You must get Keg for this date.” Keg was in New York, but Gigi is such an enthusiast that he hunted down his man by means of a series of transatlantic phone calls. Keg said: “Alright. I’ll do the gig. One condition: Include in my journey a trip to Spain, expenses paid. It’s always been my ambition to go there.” The deal was made.

Nat Peck had a couple of drinks with Keg before the job. Before they started playing, he noticed to his consternation that Keg. was dozing. He nudged “It’s alright”, said Keg.

Well, he didn’t sound quite as great as on the record. Maybe everyone was expecting too much. Later, they said to him: “We heard this album that you did with Gil Evans.” Said Keg: “What album?” “Some of the finest bass trombone playing I’ve heard in my life”, said Nat Peck. “What album?” asked Keg. “That wasn’t me. As a matter of fact, I’m not really a bass trombone player; I had to borrow this thing. I certainly never did an album with Gil Evans on bass trombone.” It was a year before they dared to tell Gigi.

They have a great respect and a great affection for Kenny. Nat Peck has known Klook for twenty years. “We started working together in Paris way back when all the expatriates were going there. His interest in music has always been amazing. He’s been listening to things and doing things and never losing his enthusiasm, even today. He gets better and better all the time.” Kenny is now well over fifty. By the time most musicians get to that age they are a bit disillusioned. Kenny Clarke isn’t. And he never at any time tries to impress any musicians about anything. fie is never anything but calm—and they have seen him in situations that were hair–raising.

“I’ve never met anyone who stayed so calm”, says Kenny Clare. “You should come along to a recording session. All pandemonium let loose. Everybody talking or blowing like a bunch of madmen. You’d think it was a wild social event. Kenny never raises his voice, never gets excited. He’s a wonder.” Nat Peck believes it is something to do with Kenny’s basic philosophy. With guys like these, there’s not really anything you can do to tame them. So forget about it. Take it as it comes, try to get something going. And the miracle always happens when somebody says “One–two–three–four.”

Kenny Clarke is not widely known for his big–band playing, since the bands he worked with before he joined Dizzy’s great outfit were not issued on record in Europe. “The only record that did him justice”, says Kenny Clare, “was a concert recorded in Paris. It wasn’t issued in Britain, though I managed to get a copy. His time—his actual rhythm playing—is not something that many can do. Gus Johnson has a similar kind of time. So many people would like to be able to get that very springy kind of beat that Klook has. I would. When I’m with him, I can play like that exactly, without even thinking about it. Soon as I’m away from it, I can’t do it any more. Strange. I can’t figure it out.” Kenny Clare got booked with the band originally when Klook got stuck in Spain. Everyone was so impressed that Gigi asked Clare to come back on the next session. It worked out so beautifully that Klook suggested that Kenny become a regular member of the band.

“After that first date”, says Kenny, “they were being nice, really. They gave me a couple of notes on vibraphone that I invariably played wrong. Well, they figured that I’d always be available to do anything that Klook wouldn’t be free to do. I could do sundry percussion. Then one number was a Turkish march thing and I played snare drum. When it was played back it sounded very much together, like one drummer They talked it over. Next time I came would I bring my drums as well? See if we could make it with both of us playing. It worked—and it’s been like that ever since.” Kenny Clarke, they say. might not appear to be a man who feels very involved in what happens in the world outside his music. He keeps pretty much to himself. Yet he has opinions on politics and the world situation—very definite ideas on the great issues.

“He is really a very intelligent man”, says Nat Peck, “And it’s not a superficial intelligence, but something very deep–rooted and something very mature.” They describe Francy Boland as not being a front man in the accepted sense. He is an introverted man and doesn’t speak that much. He doesn’t have a big voice. His authority shows most in his writing—and in the attitude of the musicians toward his writing. According to Gigi Campi, the band is a community. Aside from the obvious differences of colour, the character of every man is in marked contrast to the next. What are they? Catholics, Marxists, Moslems, Zionists, Socialists and Capitalists—a mixture. This was the one aspect of the international band that used to frighten some. With such a mixture is was potentially . . . explosive.

What happened was that it exploded on the stand. The concert in Prague was ridiculous. The programme was supposed to run for 50 minutes. The band played for an hour and forty–five minutes. That included a short encore. The musicians walked off to thunderous acclaim. Kenny Clare went upstairs and changed, then came down for a drink. The audience was still applauding. It must have kept it up for nearly ten minutes.

They say that there are seventeen soloists here, each man a strong individualist. Francy just walks to the front, waves a hand and the band blows. He walks back. The band has its own personality—a composite. It is a projection of seventeen musicians. In different circumstances these men might find themselves in conflict. Instead there is tolerance and respect. And affection. When it comes to music there is no argument. Never.

One might expect to find a man as able as Boland to have his prickly side; or presume his concentration is balanced by or disorganisation on some non–musical level. Instead, he is tidy. Respectable. He is married, has two children. Plays tennis, is a keen photographer. He has never been caught practising the piano or taking pictures of musicians.

He plays tennis at/a certain time; he writes his arrangements at a certain time. He is well–organised and un–temperamental. He has been known to write arrangements in the living room with the rest of the family watching television and the volume full on. Or with his son playing Beatles records.

Benny Bailey observed: “Everything he writes seems so simple, so normal; but just try to dissect his colours and you end up pretty badly: all the secrets lie between the lines.” It is the simplicity, the concentration on essentials, that is his strength. One musician listened to “Lockjaw’s Blues” 16 times and said: “Only now do I know what’s in there—and I still have to take it home and listen some more.

Once, they tried another arranger - and listened to the playback of the tunes. “That’s not our music”, they said. “It’s an imitation of bebop.”

“It is the band of coexistence”, says Gigi Campi. “Everything is so straight. There is no bullshine. It is hard to keep a band like that, because it is hard to keep integrity. There are so many promoters and record producers exerting pressure: “If you come down to this compromise we might succeed commercially.

“When we did a waltz album, Francy refused to arrange Viennese waltzes. He said they were written to be played the way they are. ‘Wives And Lovers’ and ‘My Favourite Things’ he did. He said they are waltzes of our time and wecan play them our way.”

They have respect for Gigi’s enthusiasm and dedication. “You’ve got to be enthusiastic to do what he’s trying to do. This is the world’s most expensive hobby. He’s got a very good instinct for people—you know, the way he gets the band together.” They allow that Gigi has made just one or two slight mistakes. There was that time that Dusko Goykovich was Haus Verboten at a radio station and the European dep. just did not gell.

Says Gigi himself: “I’m just hooked on jazz. Apart from that. I believe in a couple of things. There is a vacuum on the market—a need for music like this. I consider this a continuation of what Ellington was doing—and I believe in a band as a team. Our music played by another band wouldn’t mean a thing. It was written for this band. When we have to replace a man, as we now have to replace Shake Keane, we almost cry.

Shake is a member of this band now—with his sound, with his solos, with his humanity.” They have to be coaxed to laud individuals—but driven, they name Benny Bailey as indispensable. “Absolutely monumental.” And Johnny Griffin—“Another monster.”

They refer to Derek Humble in terms of genius, knowing it to be an overworked word. “Not just his jazz playing. His lead playing is superb.” Ronnie Scott, they say, plays beautifully, and they believe that Tony Coe is going to find the environment one that he will enjoy, and also that it will bring his considerable talents to full development. To use Nat Peck’s words: “He never had the boot in the behind that he’s going to get in this band.”

By all accounts, Ake Persson is a phenomenal trombonist. Peck has now been working with him for more than five years. “Every time I sit down with him it’s like I’m hearing him for the first time. Thrilling. I’ve never worked with anyone who has stimulated me so much. He makes you try to play up to his standard. The guy is an authentic musician. Everyone that’s heard him agrees. I was talking to J. J. Johnson about him and he was absolutely submerged by Ake’s playing. And that coming from J.J. . . . . He’s a guy who doesn’t say what he doesn’t mean.”

Tony Coe may be facing an ordeal. Kenny Clare describes his first date with the band as “one of the most frightening experiences of my life.” Of course, he knew who he was depping for. “Before that first number started, I was petrified. I was following a very hard act.” After the first number, the. rest of the band went out of their way to make Kenny feel he’d made it, and that helped him to settle, Ronnie Scott declares that the two drummers complement each other. “Kenny Clare ‘is more Buddy Rich inclined; Kenny Clarke is . . . basic.” Ronnie, as we all know, is a man of shrewd eye and sardonic utterance. And his ears are certainly not painted on.

Says he: “One would be hard put to better this personnel in Europe. If I were to form a band, these are the guys I would pick.” There can’t be a last word on the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band. But the Scott declaration will do for the time being. Tony Brown.

By Bob Henrit| May 21st, 2015|Categories: Groovers and Shakers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Clarke

Kenny Clarke

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kenneth Clarke Spearman (January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985), nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the Ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-hat, along with the use of the bass drum for irregular accents ("dropping bombs").
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was orphaned at the age of about five and began playing the drums when he was about eight or nine on the urging of a teacher at his orphanage. Turning professional in 1931 at the age of seventeen, he moved to New York City in 1935, establishing his drumming style and reputation. As the house drummer at Minton's Playhouse in the early 1940s, he participated in the after-hours jams that led to the birth of bebop. After military service in the US and Europe between 1943 and 1946,he returned to New York, but between 1948 and 1951 he was mostly based in Paris. He stayed in New York between 1951 and 1956, performing with the Modern Jazz Quartet and playing on early Miles Davis recordings during this time. He then moved permanently to Paris, where he performed and recorded with European and visiting American musicians and co-led the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band between 1961 and 1972. He continued to perform and record until the month before he died of a heart attack in January 1985.

Biography

Early life and career (1914–1935)

Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 9, 1914^{[note 1]} as the youngest of two sons, to Martha Grace Scott, a pianist from Pittsburgh, and Charles Spearman, a trombonist from Waycross, Georgia. The family home was on Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill District of Pittsburgh. Clarke's father left the household to start a new family in Yakima, Washington, and his mother, who began a relationship with a Baptist preacher shortly afterwards, died suddenly in her late twenties when Clarke was about five, leaving him an orphan. He and his brother were placed in the Coleman Industrial Home for Negro Boys. .^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] He played in the orphanage's marching band on the snare drum, which he had taken up on the urging of a teacher at about age eight or nine, after trying a few brass instruments. When he was young he also played the piano, on which his mother had taught him to play simple tunes, along with the pump organ at the parish church, for which he played hymns and composed pieces that were introduced there.^[3]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] At the age of eleven or twelve, he and his brother resumed living with his stepfather, who did not look favorably upon music or associating with those involved with it. He dropped out of Herron Hill Junior High School at the age of fifteen to become a professional musician. Around the same time, his stepfather threw Clarke and his brother out of his house after an argument, and Clarke was placed without his brother in a foster home, where he lived for about a year until his sixteenth birthday.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]

He then took on several odd jobs while establishing his music career, becoming a local professional with the Leroy Bradley Band by the age of seventeen. After touring with the Roy Eldridge band through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, he returned to Bradley's band based at the Cotton Club in Cincinnati. He stayed with that band for two years, broken up by a two-month stint with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, which at the time included trumpeter Harry Edison and bassist Walter Page, who would go on to be featured in the Count Basie Orchestra. Around this time he took up the vibraphone, with assistance from Adrian Rollini, a pioneer on the instrument.^[3]^[5]^[8]

Move to New York and innovations (1935–1943)

In late-1935, Clarke moved to New York City, where he dropped the surname "Spearman" to become "Kenny Clarke". He doubled on drums and the vibraphone in a trio with his half-brother Frank, a bassist and guitarist who had recently moved to New York and likewise changed his surname from "Spearman" to "Clarke" to profit from Kenny's newfound fame. In 1936 Clarke played alongside guitarist Freddie Green in a group fronted by tenor saxophonist Lonnie Simmons, where he began to experiment with rhythmic patterns against the basic beat of the band. From April 1937 to April 1938 He was in Edgar Hayes's group, still doubling on vibraphone, where he made his recording debut and traveled overseas for the first time. When he returned to the US with the band, he struck up a personal and musical friendship with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie who had been hired for the group's one-week stint at the Apollo Theater in New York.^[3]^[5]^[8]^[9] In his book Drummin' Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz, music critic Burt Korall writes of this time period: "Clarke was moving beyond mere functional timekeeping. He had begun to outline and emphasize ensemble, brass, and saxophone figures and to support soloists in the manner that before long would be identified as his. ... The revision of the swing drum style had not yet become fully apparent. But it was clear Clarke was working on something new."^[8] He was encouraged in these endeavors by composer/arranger Joe Garland, who gave him the band's trumpet parts , and suggested that he play along with the brass when he felt it necessary to emphasize or support their lines.^[8]

He then spent eight months playing drums and the vibraphone in Claude Hopkins's group, before Gillespie gave Clarke an opening to join him in the Teddy Hill band in the Savoy Ballroom in 1939.^[8] While playing for this group on a fast tune, he came upon the idea of using the Ride cymbal on his right hand to keep time rather than the hi-hat, an approach that freed up his left hand to play more syncopated figures.^[3]^[10] On the bass drum he played irregular accents (dropping bombs), while using the hi-hat on the backbeats, adding more color to his drumming.^[3]^[10] With Gillespie, who encouraged this new approach to time keeping, Clarke wrote a series of exercises for himself to develop the independence of the bass drum and snare drum, while maintaining the time on the ride cymbal. One of these passages, a combination of a rimshot on the snare followed directly by a "bomb", reportedly inspired Clarke's nickname, "Klook", which was short for "Klook-mop", in imitation of the sound this combination produced.^[3]^[10] At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Clarke played opposite a band led by fellow drummer Chick Webb, who strongly influenced him and encouraged his rhythmic explorations.^[8]^[10] He was briefly fired from Hill's band due to unrest in the trombone section about his unorthodox time-keeping methods, but later returned and stayed with the group until it disbanded in 1940. He then worked with bands led by Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald (where he and Gillespie are said to have co-written the composition "Salt Peanuts", and Louis Armstrong, before working with Roy Eldridge once again along with the Count Basie Orchestra. He also made recordings with Bechet, Fitzgerald, and Mildred Bailey.^[8]

In 1941, Clarke was hired by Hill, who had become the manager of Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, to handle the music at the club. Clarke was given free rein over whom he could hire and which style of music he could play. The house band consisted of trumpeter Joe Guy, pianist Thelonious Monk, bassist Nick Fenton, and Clarke on drums. Regulars at the club included Gillespie and guitarist Charlie Christian, and bandleaders such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman listened to or participated in the sessions.^[3]^[8] In his entry on Clarke in American National Biography, Barry Kernfeld wrote: "The sessions became famous for demonstrations of virtuosity—unexpected harmonies, fast tempos, unusual keys—that discouraged those whose style did not fit in well. These experimental sounds were crucial to the development of bebop."^[3] It was in this setting that Clarke and Monk co-wrote the jazz standard "Epistrophy", originally known as "Fly Right". He then led his own band at Kelly's Stables in New York, the Kansas City Six, featuring tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec, where the two are said to have come up with the riff tune "Mop Mop", played in a septet with saxophonist Benny Carter, and performed with Red Allen's band in Boston and Chicago.^[3]^[8]

Military service and later career in the United States (1943–1956)

Clarke was drafted into the US army and reported for induction in 1943. During his basic training in 1944, he married singer Carmen McRae. He went absent without leave for nearly four months, during which time he played with Cootie Williams and Dinah Washington, before being captured and sent to Europe. he eventually became part of the Special Services where he led and sang in chorales and performed on drums, trombone, and piano in various bands. While in Paris he met pianist and arranger John Lewis, with whom he began a long association.^[3]^[8]

Shortly after being discharged from the military and 1946, Clarke converted to Islam and took the name Liaquat Ali Salaam.^[7]^[10] He joined Dizzy Gillespie's band for eight months, replacing Max Roach, who had become the most important bebop drummer in Clarke's absence. Clarke introduced Lewis to the band and made several bop recordings with Gillespie's sextet including "One Bass Hit (part 1)" and "Oop Bop Sh'Bam", where his nickname was enshrined in the scat lyrics "Oop bop sh'bam a klook a mop".^[3]^[8]^[10] He left Gillespie's band temporarily and worked with Tadd Dameron, Sonny Stitt, Fats Navarro, and his own 52nd Street Boys, before rejoining Gillespie's group in December 1947. He embarked on a tour with the band in Europe in early 1948, which he considered the highlight of his career. He stayed on in Paris until that August, recording, performing, teaching, and helping to select musicians for the First International Jazz Festival. He then returned to New York for nine months to work with Dameron's group at the Royal Roost. During this time he also played with bassist Oscar Pettiford's band and recorded in the second session of the Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool. Also around this time, or perhaps shortly afterward, he developed an addiction to heroin that lasted until at least the 1960s. In 1948 he permanently separated from McRae; they divorced in 1956.^[3]^[8]^[10] In May 1949 Clarke returned to Paris for the festival, making the city his home base for the next two years. While there he worked and recorded with bands led by pianist Bernard Peiffer and saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and returned to Bechet's band. At this time he met and had a brief affair with jazz singer Annie Ross, which resulted in a son, Kenny Clarke Jr. (born 1950), who was raised by Clarke's brother and his wife.^[3]^[11]

Upon returning to New York in 1951, he toured with Billy Eckstine, and made recordings with saxophonist Charlie Parker's quintet and Milt Jackson's quartet. Jackson's ensemble, which included Clarke's friend John Lewis, became the Modern Jazz Quartet, and he performed with the group at the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 and recorded for their albums Modern Jazz Quartet (1952), 1953: An Exceptional Encounter (1953), and Django (1953–1955).^[3]^[8]^[12] He left the ensemble in 1955, saying "I wouldn't be able to play the drums my way again after four or five years of playing eighteenth-century drawing-room jazz".^[3] Korall wrote of his work in the group:

During that period, Clarke provided his share of identity for the band. His cymbal sound and bass drum work were light and quietly persuasive. Charming rudimental touches – well-executed ruffs, triplets, short rolls on a tightly tuned snare – added dimension as he danced within or around the time. His solos, in short bursts, were conceptually strong, well played, often fascinating, and a little more complex than they seemed.^[8]

Between 1951 and 1954 Clarke recorded with Miles Davis,^[8] including tracks that appeared on the 1957 compilation albums Bags' Groove^[13] and Walkin',^[14] along with 1959's Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants.^[15] Korall described these recordings as "his best work of the 1950s – perhaps of his entire career", writing: "Clarke follows feelings, lives inside the pulse, defining the contours, dynamics, and implications of each solo and each piece. Like Dave Tough, he is a totally unselfish player – nonintrusive yet spirited and spiritual."^[8] In mid-1955 he rejoined Pettiford's group at Café Bohemia, later working with him and pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. at Basin Street West and recording with Pettiford on Newborn's 1956 album Here Is Phineas.^[3]^[16] During this period he was the resident drummer and a talent scout for Savoy Records, introducing the label to artists such as saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Pepper Adams, and trumpeter Donald Byrd.^[3] He often worked with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who dubbed Clarke's location in his studio "Klook's corner".^[8]

Move to Paris and later life (1956–1985)

In September 1956, Clarke moved to Paris where he initially worked with Jacques Hélian's orchestra, before holding engagements at the Club Saint-Germain and the Blue Note.^[3] He regularly worked with visiting American musicians such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Getz,notably contributing with Davis to the soundtrack for Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.^[8]^[10] Clarke also formed a trio, known as "The Three Bosses", with pianist Bud Powell, another Paris resident, and bassist Pierre Michelot, who had also played on the Davis soundtrack. In 1963 The Three Bosses recorded the album Our Man in Paris with tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.^[10] In 1961, with Belgian pianist Francy Boland, Clarke formed the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band, featuring leading European and expatriate American musicians. It began touring in 1966 and was active until 1972.^[3]^[8] Korall said of his contribution to the band: "Playing softer than most drummers in a large ensemble, feeding the surge, doing the work of the great accompanist he always had been, Clarke consistently proved flash is totally irrelevant. He used just enough decoration to make the band's music, much of it with a blues base, a bit more exciting and interesting for the players and listeners."^[8]

In 1962 he married Daisy Wallbach, a Dutch woman, and they settled in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. The couple had a son, Laurent (born 1964). Clarke began a drumming school with Dante Agostini at the headquarters of the instrument maker Henri Selmer Paris in 1965, and he and Agostini spent seven years creating a drumming method.^[17]^[18] In 1967, he began teaching at the Saint-Germain-en-Laye Conservatoire (where he worked until 1972).^[3]^[8]^[10] He had a period of convalescence after a heart attack in 1975, before going to Chicago in September 1976 for a reunion of Gillespie's big band.^[3]^[7] In 1979 he taught jazz at the University of Pittsburgh as a substitute for his friend Nathan Davis.^[4] He performed in European jazz festivals until 1983 and made his last performances at a five-night-a-week engagement in December 1984.^[3]^[7] On January 26, 1985, he died of a second heart attack at his home; he was 71.^[3]

Recognition

Clarke was made an NEA Jazz Master in 1983^[19] and inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame through the Critics' Poll in 1988.^[20]

Discography

As leader or co-leader

Special Kenny Clarke 1938–1959 (Jazz Muse)
Telefunken Blues (Savoy, 1955)
Kenny Clarke & Ernie Wilkins (Savoy, 1955) with Ernie Wilkins
Bohemia After Dark (Savoy, 1955)
Klook's Clique (Savoy, 1956)
Jazzmen: Detroit (Savoy, 1956)
Plays André Hodeir (Philips, 1956)
The Golden 8 (Blue Note, 1961)
Americans in Europe Vol. 1 (Impulse!, 1963)
Pieces of Time (Soul Note, 1983)

Kenny Clarke / Francy Boland Big Band (1962–1971)

see discography section of The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band

As sideman

With Gene Ammons

All Star Sessions (Prestige, 1950–55 [1956])
Gene Ammons and Friends at Montreux (Prestige, 1973)

With Elek Bacsik

The Electric Guitar of the Eclectic Elek Bacsik (Fontana, 1962)

With Eddie Bert

Musician of the Year (Savoy, 1955)
Encore (Savoy, 1955)
Montage (Savoy, 1955)

With Ray Bryant

Ray Bryant Trio (Epic, 1956)

With Kenny Burrell

Jazzmen Detroit with Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Pepper Adams, Paul Chambers (1956; Savoy)
Introducing Kenny Burrell (Blue Note, 1956)

With Donald Byrd

Byrd's Word (Savoy, 1955)

With Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin

Tough Tenors Again 'n' Again (MPS, 1970)

With Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh

With Miles Davis

Birth of the Cool (Capitol, 1949)
Bags' Groove (Prestige, 1957)
Walkin' (Prestige, 1957)
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Fontana, 1958)
Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (Prestige, 1959)

With Art Farmer

Early Art (New Jazz, 1954)
When Farmer Met Gryce (Prestige, 1954) with Gigi Gryce

With Frank Foster

No 'Count (Savoy, 1956)

With Dizzy Gillespie

The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (Bluebird, 1937–1949, [1995])
Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris (Philips, 1963)
The Giant (America, 1973)
The Source (America, 1973)

With Dexter Gordon

Our Man in Paris (Blue Note, 1963)
Blues à la Suisse (Prestige, 1973)

With Johnny Griffin

Night Lady (Philips, 1964)

With Urbie Green

Blues and Other Shades of Green (ABC-Paramount, 1955)

With Hampton Hawes

Playin' in the Yard (Prestige, 1973)

With Milt Jackson

Roll 'Em Bags (Savoy, 1949–56)
Wizard of the Vibes (Blue Note, 1952)
Meet Milt Jackson (Savoy, 1954–56)
Opus de Jazz (Savoy, 1955)
Ballads & Blues (Atlantic, 1956)
The Jazz Skyline (Savoy, 1956)

With J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding

Jay and Kai (Columbia, 1957)

With Hank Jones

The Trio (Savoy, 1955)
Bluebird (Savoy, 1955)
Quartet-Quintet (Savoy, 1955)
Hank Jones' Quartet (Savoy, 1956)

With John Lewis

Afternoon in Paris (Atlantic, 1957) with Sacha Distel

With Carmen McRae

Carmen McRae (Bethlehem 1954)

With Charles Mingus

Jazz Composers Workshop (Savoy, 1954–55)

With the Modern Jazz Quartet

Modern Jazz Quartet (Prestige, 1952)
Django (Prestige, 1956)
1953: An Exceptional Encounter (The Jazz Factory, 2001)

With Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington with Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford (1955; Riverside)

With Jean-Christian Michel

Sacred Music (1969; Barclay)
JQM (1972; General Records)
Ouverture spatiale (1974; General)
Eve des Origines (1976; General)
Port Maria (1977; General)

With Phineas Newborn Jr.

Here Is Phineas (Atlantic, 1956)

With Sahib Shihab

Summer Dawn (Argo, 1964)
Seeds (Vogue Schallplatten, 1968)
Companionship (Vogue Schallplatten, 1964–70 [1971])

With Zoot Sims

Lost Tapes Baden-Baden 1958 (SWR, 2014)

With Idrees Sulieman

Bird's Grass (SteepleChase, 1976 [1985])

With Cal Tjader

Cal Tjader: Vibist (Savoy, 1954)

With Julius Watkins

Julius Watkins Sextet (Blue Note, 1954)

With Frank Wess

North, South, East....Wess (Savoy 1956)
Opus in Swing (Savoy, 1956)

With Joe Wilder

Wilder 'n' Wilder (Savoy, 1956)

With Ernie Wilkins

Flutes & Reeds (Savoy, 1955) with Frank Wess
Top Brass (Savoy, 1955)

Notes

Most sources, including Clarke himself in an interview,^[1] give his birthdate as January 9, but in the book Paris Without Regret: James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Kenny Clarke, and Donald Byrd (1986),^[2] Ursula Broschke-Davis states that he was born on January 2.^[3]

https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2014/01/08/260769892/the-drummer-who-invented-jazzs-basic-beat

A Blog Supreme

From NPR Jazz

A Blog Supreme

The Drummer Who Invented Jazz's Basic Beat

It doesn't take an expert to identify this sound as a jazz rhythm:

Jazz ride pattern on 20" Istanbul Mehmet Sultan series

Musicians call it "spang-a-lang," for obvious phonetic reasons, and it's so synonymous with jazz, it no longer occurs to us that someone had to invent it. But someone did: a drummer named Kenny Clarke, who would have turned 100 today.

Spang-a-lang was only part of Clarke's innovation. Marking time on the ride cymbal with his right hand — previously, jazz drummers employed the bass drum with the right foot — gave his left hand and feet the freedom and sonic space to play thundering accents ("dropping bombs") at irregular intervals. The sound they made inspired another phonetic term: "Klook," which became Clarke's nickname.

"Clarke represents a tectonic shift," drummer and educator Ralph Peterson says. "He is the patriarch of drumming in modern jazz."

Born in Pittsburgh in 1914, Clarke was a musical prodigy, drumming professionally with local big bands in his teens. By his 20s, he was working with Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge, superstars in their day.

This was the late '30s: Jazz was still dance music, with the drums providing heavy beats for Lindy-hopping feet. Most drummers struck the bass on every beat in the measure, a technique known as four-on-the-floor. But as Clarke recalled to writer Ira Gitler in Swing to Bop, while playing with Teddy Hill's big band one night in 1939, an arrangement of "Old Man River" went too fast for his foot to work the bass pedal. Instead, he kept the pulse going on the cymbal, using the bass and snare to "cut the time up."

It was initially too weird for dancers and bandmates used to four-on-the-floor: Clarke was soon fired. But Teddy Hill remembered him in 1941, when recruiting the house band for a Harlem spot called Minton's Playhouse. Minton's became the laboratory for what would soon be called bebop or modern jazz — a less danceable, more abstract approach to the music — which was built substantially on Clarke's rhythmic ideas. The classic tune "Epistrophy," which Clarke wrote with pianist Thelonious Monk, is shaped like the bombs he dropped: an asymmetrical melody with accents placed irregularly, often just off the beat.

"Epistrophy (excerpt)" by Kenny Clarke & His 52nd Street Boys, Sept. 5, 1946

Clarke was drafted in 1943 and spent three years in the Army, thus personally missing out on bebop's first public breakthrough. But its prime practitioners knew what he'd contributed, and when he was discharged, trumpeter and bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie installed Clarke in the rhythm section of his new big band. (That rhythm section later broke off and became the first incarnation of the Modern Jazz Quartet.)

As bebop gained predominance, Clarke became the most in-demand drummer on the scene — so much so that he began turning away work with major figures like Miles Davis. "Miles knocked on my door, so I told the little girl I was with to tell him I'm out," Clarke told journalist Mike Zwerin. "I was tired, man."

In 1956, he took a gig in Paris with pianist Michel Legrand. It was supposed to be a brief respite from New York; instead, Clarke stayed in Paris until his death in 1985. He was out of the American jazz limelight, but got to play music on his own terms. He played often with old friends from the U.S. who were passing through or similarly expatriated, and with the big band that he co-led throughout the 1960s with Belgian pianist Francy Boland.

Other drummers would refine his ideas, and often receive more credit as innovators. But it was Clarke who first established the rhythmic language that we recognize immediately as jazz today.

Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke

Mike Hennessey

Quartet Books, 1990

https://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/Kenny_Clarke.html

Kenny Clarke
January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985

Kenny Clarke Our Delight - 1972
Kenny Clarke - Kenny Clare Clarke - Boland Big Band The Drum Duet	Kenny Clarke - Kenny Clare Clarke - Boland Big Band Volcano
Kenny Clarke Quintet 1966	Kenny Clarke with The J.J. Johnson All-Stars
Kenny Clarke - Kenny Clare Clarke - Boland Big Band Washington D.C.	Kenny Clarke - Lucky Thompson Quintet Strike Up The Band - 1960

Kenny Clarke was a highly influential if subtle drummer who helped to define bebop drumming. He was the first to shift the time-keeping rhythm from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, an innovation that has been copied and utilized by a countless number of drummers since the early '40s.

Clarke played vibes, piano and trombone in addition to drums while in school. After stints with Roy Eldridge (1935) and the Jeter-Pillars band, Clarke joined Edgar Hayes' Big Band (1937-38). He made his recording debut with Hayes (which is available on a Classics CD) and showed that he was one of the most swinging drummers of the era.

A European tour with Hayes gave Clarke an opportunity to lead his own session, but doubling on vibes was a definite mistake! Stints with the orchestras of Claude Hopkins (1939) and Teddy Hill (1940-41) followed and then Clarke led the house band at Minton's Playhouse (which also included Thelonious Monk).

The legendary after-hours sessions led to the formation of bop and it was during this time that Clarke modernized his style and received the nickname "Klook-Mop" (later shortened to "Klook") due to the irregular "bombs" he would play behind soloists. A flexible drummer, Clarke was still able to uplift the more traditional orchestras of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (1941) and the combos of Benny Carter (1941-42), Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins; he also recorded with Sidney Bechet. However after spending time in the military, Clarke stayed in the bop field, working with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and leading his own modern sessions; he co-wrote "Epistrophy" with Monk and "Salt Peanuts" with Gillespie. Clarke spent the late '40s in Europe, was with Billy Eckstine in the U.S. in 1951 and became an original member of the Modern Jazz Quartet (1951-55).

However he felt confined by the music and quit the MJQ to freelance, performing on an enormous amount of records during 1955-56.

In 1956 Clarke moved to France where he did studio work, was hired by touring American all-stars and played with Bud Powell and Oscar Pettiford in a trio called the Three Bosses (1959-60). Clarke was co-leader with Francy Boland of a legendary all-star big band (1961-72), one that had Kenny Clarke playing second drums! Other than a few short visits home, Kenny Clarke worked in France for the remainder of his life and was a major figure on the European jazz scene.

Kenny Clarke
1966

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

Kenny Clarke - Kenny ClareClarke - Boland Big Band

Miles...

Kenny Clarke - Jimmy Woode

Kenny Clarke
with The J.J. Johnson All-Stars - 1964

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

Kenny Clarke
January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985

Kenny Clarke - Oscar Petitford - Zoot Sims

KENNY CLARKE:
Though the founder of modern drumming had an extensive recording career both stateside and abroad, it's a shame that just not that many of his recordings are available. He can be heard with Charlie Parker on half the tracks on "Swedish Schnaps" (1952: Verve label) and on the legendary Charlie Christian sides recorded at Minton's by Jerry Newman in 1941 (out on any number of labels).

"Swiss Radio Days" finds Clarke in the company of Coleman Hawkins in 1949 (TCB Records label), with Dizzy Gillespie's big band on "Cubana Be, Cubana Bop" (1947: RCA label), and with the original version of the Modern Jazz Quartet on "La Ronde" (1952: Prestige label). Clarke made a number of great small group sides for the Savoy label in the mid-1950s, including "Bohemia After Dark," "Klook's Clique" and "The Trio," but those items are tough to obtain.

Thankfully being issued recently is Clarke's wonderful, latter-day work as co-leader of the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland big band, available on "Jazz is Universal" (1962: Collectables label).

Kenny Clare - Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke - Kenny Clare
Clarke - Boland Big Band
The Drum Duet
1968

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

Iambic Parameter
Kenny Clarke - Milt Jackson

Broadway
Dexter Gordon

Manteca
Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo

Scrapple from the Apple
Dexter Gordon

Le Petit Bal - Miles Davis
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

Diner au Motel - Miles Davis
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

Modern Jazz Quartet: John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke
Our Delight - 1972

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

Kenny Clarke
with Lucky Thompson Quintet
STRIKE UP THE BAND
1960

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

Kenny Clarke - Kenny Clare
Clarke - Boland Big Band
Volcano
1968

All Kenny Clarke Videos are

https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/kenny-clarke

Kenny Clarke, known among musicians as "Klook" for one of his characteristic drum licks, is truly a jazz pioneer. He was a leader in the rhythmic advances that signaled the beginning of the modern jazz era, his drum style becoming the sound of bebop and influencing drummers such as Art Blakey and Max Roach.

Clarke studied music broadly while in high school, including piano, trombone, drums, vibraphone, and theory. Such versatility of knowledge would later serve him well as a bandleader. Clarke moved to New York in late 1935, where he first began developing his unique approach to the drums, one with a wider rhythmic palette than that of the swing band drummers. Instead of marking the count with the top cymbal, Clarke used counter-rhythms to accent the beat, what became known as "dropping of bombs."

He found a kindred spirit in Dizzy Gillespie when they hooked up in Teddy Hill's band in 1939. A key opportunity to further expand his drum language came in late 1940 when he landed a gig in the house band (with Thelonious Monk on piano, and Nick Fenton on bass) at Minton's Playhouse. It was this trio that welcomed such fellow travelers as guitarist Charlie Christian, Gillespie, and a host of others to its nightly jam sessions. These sessions became the primary laboratory for their brand of jazz, which came to be called bebop.

A stint in the Army from 1943-46 introduced him to pianist John Lewis. After their discharge he and Lewis joined Gillespie's bebop big band, which gave Clarke his first taste of Paris during a European tour. After returning to New York, he joined the Milt Jackson Quartet, which metamorphosed into the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1952. Though he and Lewis remained friends, Clarke chafed at what he felt was the too-staid atmosphere of the MJQ. In 1956, he migrated to Paris, which became his home for nearly 30 years, working with Jacques Helian's band and backing up visiting U.S. jazz artists.

During the years 1960-73, he co-led the major Europe-based jazz big band with Belgian pianist Francy Boland, the Clarke-Boland Big Band. The band featured the best of Europe's jazz soloists, including a number of exceptional U.S. expatriate musicians living in Europe. Among these were saxophonists Johnny Griffin and Sahib Shihab, and trumpeter Idrees Sulieman. After the disbanding of his big band, Clarke found numerous opportunities both on the bandstand and teaching in the classroom. He remained quite active as a freelancer, often working with visiting U.S. jazz musicians, until his death in 1985. In 1988, Clarke was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame.

Selected Discography:

Modern Jazz Quartet, The Artistryof the Modern Jazz Quartet, Prestige, 1952-55 Bohemia After Dark, Savoy, 1955 Discoveries, Savoy, 1955 Kenny Clarke Meets the Detroit Jazzmen, Savoy, 1956 Clarke-Boland Big Band, RTE, 1968

Welcome to Sound Projections

Saturday, December 7, 2019

Kenny Clarke (1914-1985): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2019

VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER ONE

Kenny Clarke

(1914-1985)

Artist Biography by Scott Yanow

Kenny Clarke — Jazz Pioneer

The Drummer Who Invented Jazz's Basic Beat

Kenny Clarke, Inventor Of Modern Jazz Drumming, At 100

Kenny Clarke Biography

Kenny Clarke's Career

Famous Works

Further Reading

Kenny “Klook” Clarke

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Klook: Kenny Clarke and The Beginnings of Modern Jazz Drumming

The Kenny Clarke - Francy Boland Big Band:

Interview Transcription

Kenny Clarke

Biography

Early life and career (1914–1935)

Move to New York and innovations (1935–1943)

Military service and later career in the United States (1943–1956)

Move to Paris and later life (1956–1985)

Recognition

Discography

As leader or co-leader

As sideman

Notes

The Drummer Who Invented Jazz's Basic Beat

It doesn't take an expert to identify this sound as a jazz rhythm:

Jazz ride pattern on 20" Istanbul Mehmet Sultan series

"Epistrophy (excerpt)" by Kenny Clarke & His 52nd Street Boys, Sept. 5, 1946

Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke - Oscar Petitford - Zoot Sims

NEA Jazz Masters:

KENNY CLARKE

Kenny Clarke

Editor's Bio

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