Results for Kenneth Clarke
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Artist:

Kenny Clarke

Born:
Jan 09, 1914 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Died:
Jan 26, 1985 in Paris

Representative Songs:

"Sonor," "Get Out of Town," "Long Note Blues (Here Is Cecco Beppe)"

Representative Albums:

Clarke-Boland Big Band, Sax No End, Plays Andre Hodeir

Similar Artists:

Influences:

Followers:

A Member of the Group:

Performed Songs By:

Worked With:

  • Real Name: Kenneth Spearman Clarke
  • Genre: Jazz
  • Active: '40s - '80s
  • Instrument: Drums

Biography

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. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide
 
 
Biography: Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke (1914 - 1985) produced experimental musical ideas that transformed the art of jazz drumming. The founder of the bebop drum style, Clarke took part in several major movements in modern American music.

Aversatile studio musician, Clarke became an integral member of Dizzy Gillespie's big band, took part in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions, and emerged as a founding member of the Modern Jazz Quartet. "Kenny Clarke was drummer for all seasons," commented Mike Hennessey in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke. "He played everything from military music to musette, from dixieland to avant-garde jazz, passing through gospel, blues, swing, mainstream, pre-bop, bebop, cool." Apart from drums, Clarke played piano, trombone, and vibraphone, and cowrote Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" and Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy."

Clarke's drum innovations helped define modern jazz. In his classic work, Inside Jazz, Leonard Feather related how "Kenny originally played Jo Jones sock cymbal style; later, gradually developed the idea that by using the top cymbal for steady rhythm, he could work out punctuation figures with his foot for bass drum effects, integrating drums with the arrangement and soloists, making drums sound like another instrument instead of just background." His abandonment of the steady four-four bass pedal figure dominant in swing music, as Thomas Owens explains in Bebop the Music and Its Players, allowed for "a variety of on-and-off beat punctuation on the bass drum and snare," often referred to in the jazz vernacular as "dropping bombs." As Owens added in Bebop, "Moving his right hand from the high hat (situated on the left) to his ride cymbal (on his right) gave him more room to maneuver his left hand on the snare drum (directly front)."

Kenneth Spearman Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9, 1914. Clarke's father, Charles Spearman, played trombone and his mother, Martha Grace Scott, gave him piano from age four until her death in the late 1920s. After his mother's death, young Kenneth and his older brother lived in a home for abandoned black children, the Coleman Industrial Home For Negro Boys. The home's teacher, an accomplished musician, encouraged Clarke's playing of the trumpet, baritone horn, and trombone. Brass instruments, however, did not hold Kenny's interest and he concentrated instead on learning the snare drum. He played the drum in the home's marching band until leaving the institution at age 12. He lived with foster parents until age 16, after which he earned a living working menial jobs.

At age 18, Kenny began his first job as a professional musician when he was hired as a substitute drummer with a local band led by Leory Bradley. After performing steadily with a trio led by saxophonist Gene Jenkins, he also played with George Hornsby's band before becoming a regular member of Bradley's ensemble. In his recollection of Bradley's band, he told Art Taylor, in Notes and Tones, "It was an exceptionally good band for the time. We went to Cincinnati and became the house band at the Cotton Club, which was sort-of a supper-show club."

New York City, America's Musical Capital

In the winter of 1935, Kenny Spearman took the professional name Clarke, and arrived in New York City. One of the youngest jazz drummers on the scene, he primarily played with older musicians. Along with his older brother, Frank, he formed a trio in which he played drums and vibraphone. Around this time, Clarke recounted in Swing to Bop, he and his brother started rethinking "how the rhythm men should play together." Because most drummers repeatedly beat the snare drum, termed "digging for coal," and rarely made use of the cymbals, Clarke further explained in Swing to Bop, he broke from this tradition by "experimenting with a continuous cymbal line." This was only the first of Clarke's many musical innovations.

Clarke joined pianist Edgar Hayes' band in April of 1937. In Talking Jazz, An Oral History, drummer Art Blakey recalled Clarke's equipment when he played for Edgar Hayes. "All [Clarke] had was a snare drum, a bass drum, and one cymbal," recounted Blakey. "The high hat hadn't been invented." During the spring of 1938, Clarke toured Scandinavia with Hayes's band. That same year, he returned to America and played with Claude Hopkins before joining Teddy Hill's band. During his stint with Hill, Clarke refrained from standard steady four-four bass pedal pattern, emphasized intricate cymbal work, and played syncopated fills. As fellow band member Dizzy Gillespie, recounted in his memoir To Be, or Not to Bop, "We started to get into a new style of playing when Kenny Clarke came into Teddy Hill's band. Kenny really got a different sound outta those drums." Clarke's new rhythmic approach, however, did not impress Hill, who likened its sound to "klook-mop, klook-mop." Hill's description of Clarke's playing led to his nickname, "Klook-Mop," or "Klook." Clarke's unorthodox style also brought complaints from the band's veteran trombonist, under whose influence Hill fired Clarke in 1940.

Founded Minton's House Band

Clarke's style flourished in the more experimental setting at Minton's Playhouse, a Harlem nightclub that became one the premiere birthplaces of bebop. In 1940 Minton's owner, Henry Minton, hired Teddy Hill as manager. Hill in turn gave Clarke the job of assembling a house band. Clarke hired trumpeter Joe Guy, bassist Nick Fenton, and Thelonious Monk for the club's Monday night jam sessions. As Clarke explained in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, "Teddy [Hill] never tried to tell us what to play. We just played what we felt." Musicians flocked to Minton's. Visitors included Benny Goodman, Lester Young, and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Gary Giddins writes in Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker that "Clarke, Monk, Gillespie, and others shared and elaborated their musical discoveries, often conspiring to scare musicians outside the clique by inserting passing chords, or stomping off hair raisingly-fast tempos." In his book, Bebop: A Social and Musical History, Scott Deveaux emphasized that Minton's jam sessions, "provided Clarke with the space to refine new and unusual techniques and the opportunity to parade his skills before has peers nightly."

During the early 1940s, Clarke balanced nightclub work and recording sessions. After his stint at Minton's, Clarke and his Kansas City Six - comprised of Monk, Fenton, trumpeter Roy Nelson, and saxophonist Ike Quebec - played at Kelly's Stables on 52nd Street. In 1941 he recorded several tracks with Count Basie. Late in the same year, he toured with Ella Fitzgerald for five weeks, and subsequently performed with saxophonist Benny Carter. Beginning in 1942 Clarke spent more than a year with Henry "Red" Allen's sextet in Chicago and Boston.

Wartime Military Service

Induction into the army in mid-1943 cut short Clarke's stint with Allen. While stationed in Alabama for basic training, he married Carman McRea in 1944. Clarke went AWOL for one hundred and seven days, during which time, he played with Cootie Williams and Dinah Washington. When he returned to the Army, Clarke was shipped overseas to Europe. In 1944, he became a regimental trombonist. After the war, Clarke returned to New York and, in 1946, he converted to Islam and took the name Liaquat Al Salaam. "Unlike some of his peers," explained Clarke's biographer Mike Hennessey, in Klook, Clarke refused "to wear his religion as badge. He kept relatively quiet about his conversion - possibly because his was rather a personalized version of the Muslim faith."

Clarke joined Gillespie's band in 1946 and took part in small group and big band recordings. "I'd been away three years . . . Such a lot was happening in music in New York, when I got back I didn't think I was up to it," confessed Clarke, as quoted in Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie. "But he encouraged me. He said, 'I don't care how you play. We want your spirit."' Participating in Gillespie's Savoy sessions, recorded in May 1946, Clarke appeared in small group which cut such sides "Oop Bop Sh'Bam" and "That's Earl Brother." As a member of Gillespie's big band, he performed on the Savoy releases "Our Delight" and "One Bass Hit." In 1947, his drum work, along with Chano Pozo's congas, provided the percussive drive for Gillespie's big band RCA/Bluebird recordings such as "Cubana Be," "Cubana Bop," "Manteca" and "Good Bait." Clarke toured Europe with Dizzy's big band in 1948, and then stayed behind in Paris five months freelancing and recording with various musicians.

Not long after Clarke returned to New York in August 1948, he joined pianist Tadd Dameron's Septet. During the following year, he appeared with Miles Davis and Dameron at the Paris Jazz Festival. A Columbia recording of the festival performance, held on May 8, 1949, proved the group, which included saxophonist James Moody, a bebop tour de force. In the album's liner notes to The Miles Davis Tadd Dameron Quintet in Paris Festival International De Jazz, French jazz writer Henri Renuad stressed that Clarke "who made every beat swing like Harlem's Savoy in its heyday," gave a "stupendous exhibition of that bebop polyrhythmic drumming to which his name is forever linked. 'Klook,' then 35 was one of the major attractions of the Festival." After the festival Clarke stayed in France where he spent the next two years performing and recording. In 1949, Clarke recorded with New Orleans alto saxophonist Sidney Bechet. On the album, Bechet included "Klook's Blues" dedicated to Clarke. The number, as John Chilton wrote in Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz, moves from a slow introduction into "a fascinating series of four-bar chases" between Bechet and Clarke "that are full of life and ingenuity." While in Paris, Clarke, through the intercession of trumpeter Dick Collins, visited famed French composer Darius Milhaud. At Milhaud's home, Clarke and Collins played while the composer took notes. "He seemed to know quite a bit about jazz," related Clarke in Hear Me Talkin' To Ya. "We stayed there about three hours. He was in his wheel chair, and he'd roll around the room, very enthusiastic."

Member Of The Modern Jazz Quartet

Beginning in the late 1940s, Clarke found himself in much demand as a studio drummer, and, in the next decade, made hundreds of sides with the best jazzmen of the period. In April of 1949, he took part in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions, performing on the numbers "Venus De Milo," "Boplicity," "Israel," and "Rouge." He recorded with Charlie Parkers' quintet in 1951 and cut the Verve sides "Si Si," "Lover Man," and "Swedish Schnapps." In 1952, Clarke joined John Lewis, Milt Jackson, and Ray Brown - the former nucleus of Gillespie's big band rhythm section - in founding the Modern Jazz Quartet. A musicians' cooperative, the MJQ began as a studio group did not perform as a regular unit until 1954. The MJQ, asserts Whitney Balliett in American Musicians II, "invented a semi-improvised collective approach that defied the banality of the endless solo and the rigidity of conventional arrangements. It developed the heart-to-heart and head-to-head musical interplay and sensitivity of a string quartet."

While a member of the MJQ, Clarke still attended various studio dates, including his own Savoy label session which produced the LP Bohemia After Dark. Recorded in June and July 1955, the album emerged as a significant effort and featured the debut of alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderly. In sessions held in 1953 and 1954, Clarke backed Miles Davis for several of his Prestige recording dates. In tribute to the one of these dates, Davis, in his memoir Miles the Autobiography, related "When it came to playing soft with brushes on the drums nobody could do it better than Klook." In 1954 and 1955, Clarke attended sessions led by trombonist Jay Johnson which made up the Blue Note albums The Eminent Jay Johnson Vol. I and Vol. II. Throughout 1956, he appeared on guitarist Kenny Burrell's LPS Jazzmen Detroit (Savoy) and Introducing Kenny Burrell (Blue Note).

Parisian Expatriation

In 1956, Clarke quit the MJQ and several months later, upon the invitation to join Jacques Helian's big band, moved to Paris. Between 1959 and 1962, Clarke worked steadily in Paris with pianist Bud Powell and other visiting Americans. During the late 1950s, Clarke became the house drummer at a newly opened Parisian jazz club, the Blue Note - an establishment he would play intermittently throughout the 1960s. At the Blue Note, Clarke, along with Powell and French bassist Pierre Michelot, formed a trio known as "The Three Bosses." Francis Puadras recalled listening to the Three Bosses during the early 1960s. "Their playing," Paudras wrote, in Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, "came together into a perfect whole, flowing and powerful. . . . There's no doubt about it, [Clarke's] drum style best suited Bud and all the great players of the bop era." In 1963, Clarke led a quintet that worked six nights a week at the Club St. Germain. That same year, he appeared on Dexter Gordon's Blue Note LP Our Man in Paris. In the album's liner notes Nat Hentoff described Clarke's accompaniment as "superbly lithe" and "crisply alive."

From 1961 until it disbanded in 1972, Clarke coled the Clarke-Boland Big Band with Fancois "Francy" Boland. The band toured extensively and featured such talents as saxophonist Johnny Griffin and trumpeters Art Farmer and Benny Bailey, as well as a second drummer, Kenny Clare. Throughout the 1970s, Clarke also taught drumming in clinics and private institutions In October of 1972, he visited America to accept the Duke Ellington Fellowship from Yale University. Back in Paris, he played the 1973 Montruex Jazz festival with Dexter Gordon. Clarke suffered a heart attack in 1975, and, after a period of convalescence, performed in Chicago in September of 1976. Though he attended only a dozen recordings sessions between 1974 and 1984, Clarke still performed at festivals and nightclubs. In December of 1984, he played an exhausting five-night-a-week engagement. As Hennessey contended in Klook, "There is no doubt that Kenny had been overtaxing himself in order to maintain his connection and commitment to the music that was in his lifeblood." After years of a demanding work schedule, Clarke died of a heart attack at his home in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois, on January 26, 1985.

In Jazz Masters of the Forties, Ira Gitler observed, Clarke "was a pioneer. His experimentation began much earlier than most jazz fans realize, and by the time all the tributaries of modern jazz ready to join forces in the early forties, he was there to contribute the very important stream of his drumming." Never concerned with stardom, Clarke, emphasized musical integrity above all else. He despised showy and extended drum solos, and, in his last years, taught the younger musicians the values of playing tastefully and improvisatorially within a group context. As Clarke related in a Down Beat interview, "It's the music that's important. That's the legacy we leave behind."

Books

Balliett, Whitney, American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz, sec. ed., Oxford University Press, 1996.

Chilton, John, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz. McMillan Press, 1987.

Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1990.

DeVeaux, Scott, Bebop: A Social and Musical History.

Giddins, Gary, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Beech Tree Books, 1987.

Gillespie, Dizzy, To Be, or not to Bop, with Al Fraser, Doubleday & Company, 1979.

Gitler, Ira, Jazz Masters of the Forties, Collier Books, 1966.

Gitler, Ira, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Feather, Leonard, Inside Jazz, Da Capo, 1977.

Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: 43 Jazz Conversations, edited by Ben Sidran, Da Capo, 1995.

Hennessey, Mike, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.

Owens, Thomas, Bebop: The Music and Its Players, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Paudras, Francis, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, Da Capo, 1986.

Shipton, Alyn, Groovin' High: The Life and Music of Dizzy Gillespie, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Sidran, Ben, Talking Jazz: 43 Jazz Conversations, Da Capo, 1995.

Taylor, Art, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews, expanded edition, Da Capo, 1993.

Periodicals

Down Beat, December 1963.

Other

Additional information for this profile was obtained from the liner notes to The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet: In Paris Festival International De Jazz, Columbia, 1977, and Our Man in Paris, Blue Note, 1962.

 
Black Biography: Kenny Clarke

jazz musician; drummer

Personal Information

Born Kenneth Spearman Clarke on January 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died in Montreuil-sous-Bois, France, January 26, 1985; son of Charles Spearman and Martha Grace Scott; married jazz singer, Carmen McRae, 1944; divorced, 1956; had one son, Kenny Clarke Jr., with jazz singer, Annie Ross; married Daisy Dina Wallbach, 1962.

Career

Substitute drummer in Leroy Bradley's band; played in the trio of Leroy Jenkins; joined George Hornsby's band; moved to New York City and played drums and vibraphone in a trio with older brother, Frank, 1935; joined the Lonnie Simmons Sextet; Edgar Hayes' Orchestra; 1937; played with Claude Hopkins, 1938; joined Teddy Hill's band; Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, 1941; led the Kansas City Six at Kelly's Stables; toured with Ella Fitzgerald and worked with Benny Carter, 1941; performed with Henry "Red" Allen's Sextet, 1942; served in U.S. Army 1943-46; joined Dizzy Gillespie's band, 1946; performed with Tadd Dameron's band 1948-49; recorded solo releases and appeared on numerous other recordings; performed in Modern Jazz Quartet 1952-56; moved to Paris, 1956; played clubs and recorded; coled the Clarke-Boland Big Band, 1961-71; opened the Kenny Clarke Drum school in Paris, 1967; performed at festivals throughout Europe, 1970s-80s.

Life's Work

Kenny Clarke produced experimental musical ideas that transformed the art of jazz drumming. The founder of the bebop drum style, Clarke took part in several major movements in modern American music. A versatile studio musician, he also became an integral member of Dizzy Gillespie's big band, took part in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions, and emerged as a founding member of the Modern Jazz Quartet. "Kenny Clarke was drummer for all seasons," commented Mike Hennessey in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke. "He played everything from military music to musette, from dixieland to avant-garde jazz, passing through gospel, blues, swing, mainstream, pre-bop, bebop, cool." Apart from drums, Clarke played piano, trombone, and vibraphone, and cowrote Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" and Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy."

Clarke's drum innovations helped define modern jazz. In his classic work, Inside Jazz, Leonard Feather related how "Kenny originally played Jo Jones sock cymbal style; later, gradually developed the idea that by using the top cymbal for steady rhythm, he could work out punctuation figures with his foot for bass drum effects, integrating drums with the arrangement and soloists, making drums sound like another instrument instead of just background." His abandonment of the steady four-four bass pedal figure dominant in swing music, as Thomas Owens explains in Bebop the Music and Its Players, allowed for "a variety of on-and-off beat punctuation on the bass drum and snare," often referred to in the jazz vernacular as "dropping bombs." As Owens added in Bebop, "Moving his right hand from the high hat (situated on the left) to his ride cymbal (on his right) gave him more room to maneuver his left hand on the snare drum (directly front)."

Kenneth Spearman Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9, 1914. Clarke's father, Charles Spearman, played trombone and his mother, Martha Grace Scott, gave him piano from age four until her death in the late 1920s. After his mother's death, young Kenneth and his older brother lived in a home for abandoned black children, the Coleman Industrial Home For Negro Boys. The home's teacher, an accomplished musician, encouraged Clarke's playing of the trumpet, baritone horn, and trombone. Brass instruments, however, did not hold Kenny's interest and he concentrated instead on learning the snare drum. He played the drum in the home's marching band until leaving the institution at age 12. He lived with foster parents until age 16, after which he earned a living working menial jobs.

At age 18, Kenny began his first job as a professional musician when he was hired as a substitute drummer with a local band led by Leory Bradley. After performing steadily with a trio led by saxophonist Gene Jenkins, he also played with George Hornsby's band before becoming a regular member of Bradley's ensemble. In his recollection of Bradley's band, he told Art Taylor, in Notes and Tones, "It was an exceptionally good band for the time. We went to Cincinnati and became the house band at the Cotton Club, which was sort-of a supper-show club."

New York City, America's Musical Capital

In the winter of 1935, Kenny Spearman took the professional name Clarke, and arrived in New York City. One of the youngest jazz drummers on the scene, he primarily played with older musicians. Along with his older brother, Frank, he formed a trio in which he played drums and vibraphone. Around this time, Clarke recounted in Swing to Bop, he and his brother started rethinking "how the rhythm men should play together." Because most drummers repeatedly beat the snare drum, termed "digging for coal," and rarely made use of the cymbals, Clarke further explained in Swing to Bop, he broke from this tradition by "experimenting with a continuous cymbal line." This was only the first of Clarke's many musical innovations.

Clarke joined pianist Edgar Hayes' band in April of 1937. In Talking Jazz, An Oral History, drummer Art Blakey recalled Clarke's equipment when he played for Edgar Hayes. "All [Clarke] had was a snare drum, a bass drum, and one cymbal," recounted Blakey. "The high hat hadn't been invented." During the spring of 1938, Clarke toured Scandinavia with Hayes's band. That same year, he returned to America and played with Claude Hopkins before joining Teddy Hill's band. During his stint with Hill, Clarke refrained from standard steady four-four bass pedal pattern, emphasized intricate cymbal work, and played syncopated fills. As fellow band member Dizzy Gillespie, recounted in his memoir To Be, or Not to Bop, "We started to get into a new style of playing when Kenny Clarke came into Teddy Hill's band. Kenny really got a different sound outta those drums." Clarke's new rhythmic approach, however, did not impress Hill, who likened its sound to "klook-mop, klook-mop." Hill's description of Clarke's playing led to his nickname, "Klook-Mop," or "Klook." Clarke's unorthodox style also brought complaints from the band's veteran trombonist, under whose influence Hill fired Clarke in 1940.

Founded Minton's House Band

Clarke's style flourished in the more experimental setting at Minton's Playhouse, a Harlem nightclub that became one the premiere birthplaces of bebop. In 1940 Minton's owner, Henry Minton, hired Teddy Hill as manager. Hill in turn gave Clarke the job of assembling a house band. Clarke hired trumpeter Joe Guy, bassist Nick Fenton, and Thelonious Monk for the club's Monday night jam sessions. As Clarke explained in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, "Teddy [Hill] never tried to tell us what to play. We just played what we felt." Musicians flocked to Minton's. Visitors included Benny Goodman, Lester Young, and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Gary Giddins writes in Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker that "Clarke, Monk, Gillespie, and others shared and elaborated their musical discoveries, often conspiring to scare musicians outside the clique by inserting passing chords, or stomping off hair raisingly-fast tempos." In his book, Bebop: A Social and Musical History, Scott Deveaux emphasized that Minton's jam sessions, "provided Clarke with the space to refine new and unusual techniques and the opportunity to parade his skills before has peers nightly."

During the early 1940s, Clarke balanced nightclub work and recording sessions. After his stint at Minton's, Clarke and his Kansas City Six--comprised of Monk, Fenton, trumpeter Roy Nelson, and saxophonist Ike Quebec--played at Kelly's Stables on 52nd Street. In 1941 he recorded several tracks with Count Basie. Late in the same year, he toured with Ella Fitzgerald for five weeks, and subsequently performed with saxophonist Benny Carter. Beginning in 1942 Clarke spent more than a year with Henry "Red" Allen's sextet in Chicago and Boston.

Wartime Military Service

Induction into the army in mid-1943 cut short Clarke's stint with Allen. While stationed in Alabama for basic training, he married Carman McRea in 1944. Clarke went AWOL for one hundred and seven days, during which time, he played with Cootie Williams and Dinah Washington. When he returned to the Army, Clarke was shipped overseas to Europe. In 1944, he became a regimental trombonist. After the war, Clarke returned to New York and, in 1946, he converted to Islam and took the name Liaquat Al Salaam. "Unlike some of his peers," explained Clarke's biographer Mike Hennessey, in Klook, Clarke refused "to wear his religion as badge. He kept relatively quiet about his conversion--possibly because his was rather a personalized version of the Muslim faith."

Clarke joined Gillespie's band in 1946 and took part in small group and big band recordings. "I'd been away three years...Such a lot was happening in music in New York, when I got back I didn't think I was up to it," confessed Clarke, as quoted in Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie. "But he encouraged me. He said, 'I don't care how you play. We want your spirit.'" Participating in Gillespie's Savoy sessions, recorded in May 1946, Clarke appeared in small group which cut such sides "Oop Bop Sh'Bam" and "That's Earl Brother." As a member of Gillespie's big band, he performed on the Savoy releases "Our Delight" and "One Bass Hit." In 1947, his drum work, along with Chano Pozo's congas, provided the percussive drive for Gillespie's big band RCA/Bluebird recordings such as "Cubana Be," "Cubana Bop," "Manteca" and "Good Bait." Clarke toured Europe with Dizzy's big band in 1948, and then stayed behind in Paris five months freelancing and recording with various musicians.

Not long after Clarke returned to New York in August 1948, he joined pianist Tadd Dameron's Septet. During the following year, he appeared with Miles Davis and Dameron at the Paris Jazz Festival. A Columbia recording of the festival performance, held on May 8, 1949, proved the group, which included saxophonist James Moody, a bebop tour de force. In the album's liner notes to The Miles Davis Tadd Dameron Quintet in Paris Festival International De Jazz, French jazz writer Henri Renuad stressed that Clarke "who made every beat swing like Harlem's Savoy in its heyday," gave a "stupendous exhibition of that bebop polyrhythmic drumming to which his name is forever linked. 'Klook,' then 35 was one of the major attractions of the Festival." After the festival Clarke stayed in France where he spent the next two years performing and recording. In 1949, Clarke recorded with New Orleans alto saxophonist Sidney Bechet. On the album, Bechet included "Klook's Blues" dedicated to Clarke. The number, as John Chilton wrote in Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz, moves from a slow introduction into "a fascinating series of four-bar chases" between Bechet and Clarke "that are full of life and ingenuity." While in Paris, Clarke, through the intercession of trumpeter Dick Collins, visited famed French composer Darius Milhaud. At Milhaud's home, Clarke and Collins played while the composer took notes. "He seemed to know quite a bit about jazz," related Clarke in Hear Me Talkin' To Ya. "We stayed there about three hours. He was in his wheel chair, and he'd roll around the room, very enthusiastic."

Member Of The Modern Jazz Quartet

Beginning in the late 1940s, Clarke found himself in much demand as a studio drummer, and, in the next decade, made hundreds of sides with the best jazzmen of the period. In April of 1949, he took part in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool sessions, performing on the numbers "Venus De Milo," "Boplicity," "Israel," and "Rouge." He recorded with Charlie Parkers' quintet in 1951 and cut the Verve sides "Si Si," "Lover Man," and "Swedish Schnapps." In 1952, Clarke joined John Lewis, Milt Jackson, and Ray Brown--the former nucleus of Gillespie's big band rhythm section--in founding the Modern Jazz Quartet. A musicians' cooperative, the MJQ began as a studio group did not perform as a regular unit until 1954. The MJQ, asserts Whitney Balliett in American Musicians II, "invented a semi-improvised collective approach that defied the banality of the endless solo and the rigidity of conventional arrangements. It developed the heart-to-heart and head-to-head musical interplay and sensitivity of a string quartet."

While a member of the MJQ, Clarke still attended various studio dates, including his own Savoy label session which produced the LP Bohemia After Dark. Recorded in June and July 1955, the album emerged as a significant effort and featured the debut of alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderly. In sessions held in 1953 and 1954, Clarke backed Miles Davis for several of his Prestige recording dates. In tribute to the one of these dates, Davis, in his memoir Miles the Autobiography, related "When it came to playing soft with brushes on the drums nobody could do it better than Klook." In 1954 and 1955, Clarke attended sessions led by trombonist Jay Johnson which made up the Blue Note albums The Eminent Jay Johnson Vol. I and Vol. II. Throughout 1956, he appeared on guitarist Kenny Burrell's LPS Jazzmen Detroit (Savoy) and Introducing Kenny Burrell (Blue Note).

Parisian Expatriation

In 1956, Clarke quit the MJQ and several months later, upon the invitation to join Jacques Helian's big band, moved to Paris. Between 1959 and 1962, Clarke worked steadily in Paris with pianist Bud Powell and other visiting Americans. During the late 1950s, Clarke became the house drummer at a newly opened Parisian jazz club, the Blue Note--an establishment he would play intermittently throughout the 1960s. At the Blue Note, Clarke, along with Powell and French bassist Pierre Michelot, formed a trio known as "The Three Bosses." Francis Puadras recalled listening to the Three Bosses during the early 1960s. "Their playing," Paudras wrote, in Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, "came together into a perfect whole, flowing and powerful....There's no doubt about it, [Clarke's] drum style best suited Bud and all the great players of the bop era." In 1963, Clarke led a quintet that worked six nights a week at the Club St. Germain. That same year, he appeared on Dexter Gordon's Blue Note LP Our Man in Paris. In the album's liner notes Nat Hentoff described Clarke's accompaniment as "superbly lithe" and "crisply alive."

From 1961 until it disbanded in 1972, Clarke coled the Clarke-Boland Big Band with Fancois "Francy" Boland. The band toured extensively and featured such talents as saxophonist Johnny Griffin and trumpeters Art Farmer and Benny Bailey, as well as a second drummer, Kenny Clare. Throughout the 1970s, Clarke also taught drumming in clinics and private institutions In October of 1972, he visited America to accept the Duke Ellington Fellowship from Yale University. Back in Paris, he played the 1973 Montruex Jazz festival with Dexter Gordon. Clarke suffered a heart attack in 1975, and, after a period of convalescence, performed in Chicago in September of 1976. Though he attended only a dozen recordings sessions between 1974 and 1984, Clarke still performed at festivals and nightclubs. In December of 1984, he played an exhausting five-night-a-week engagement. As Hennessey contended in Klook, "There is no doubt that Kenny had been overtaxing himself in order to maintain his connection and commitment to the music that was in his lifeblood." After years of a demanding work schedule, Clarke died of a heart attack at his home in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil-sous-Bois, on January 26, 1985.

In Jazz Masters of the Forties, Ira Gitler observed, Clarke "was a pioneer. His experimentation began much earlier than most jazz fans realize, and by the time all the tributaries of modern jazz ready to join forces in the early forties, he was there to contribute the very important stream of his drumming." Never concerned with stardom, Clarke, emphasized musical integrity above all else. He despised showy and extended drum solos, and, in his last years, taught the younger musicians the values of playing tastefully and improvisatorially within a group context. As Clarke related in a Down Beat interview, "It's the music that's important. That's the legacy we leave behind."

Awards

Duke Ellington Fellowship from Yale University, 1972; National Endowment for the Arts Award, 1983.

Works

Selected discography

  • Kenny Clarke, Bohemia After Dark, Savoy.
  • Kenny Clarke, Telefunken Blues, Savoy.
  • The Modern Jazz Quartet, Django, Prestige, 1987.
  • Clarke Boland Big Band, RTE, 1992.
  • Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland, Blowing the Cobwebs Out, Emanon.
  • Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band, Calypso Blues, Ubiquity Recordings.
  • With Miles Davis
  • Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, Capitol, 1989.
  • The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet: In Paris Festival International De Jazz, Columbia, 1977.
  • Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, Prestige, 1987.
  • Miles Davis All Stars, Prestige, 1987.
  • Miles Davis Blue Haze, Prestige, 1988.
  • Miles Davis and the Modern Giants, Prestige, 1989.
  • With Milt Jackson
  • Milt Jackson, Blue Note, 1989.
  • Opus de Jazz, Savoy, 1955.
  • In the Beginning, Original Jazz Classics.
  • With Others
  • (With Sidney Bechet) Sidney Bechet, His Best Recordings 1923-1941, Best of Jazz, 1994.
  • (With Charlie Christian) The Immortal Charlie Christian, Laser Light, 1993.
  • (With Dizzy Gillespie) Groovin' High, Savoy, C-D reissue 1992. (With Dizzy Gillespie) The Complete Victor Recordings, RCA, 1995.
  • (With Thelonious Monk) Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, Original Jazz Classics.
  • (With Jay Jay Johnson) The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson Vol.I, Vol. II, Blue Note, 1989.
  • (With Kenny Burrell) Jazzmen Detroit, Savoy, reissued by Nippon Columbia, 1992.
  • (With Kenny Burrell), Introducing Kenny Burrell, Blue Note, 1995.
  • (With Charlie Parker) Charlie Parker Swedish Schnapps, Verve, 1991.
  • (Dexter Gordon) Our Man in Paris, Blue Note, 1987.
  • (With Cannonball Adderly) Cannonball Adderly Verve Master 31, 1994.
  • Film Soundtracks
  • (French Films)
  • Elevator to the Gallows, (with Miles Davis) 1958.
  • Two Are Guilty, 1962.
  • The Only Game in Town, 1969.

Further Reading

Books

  • Balliett, Whitney, American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz, sec. ed., Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 303.
  • Chilton, John, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz. McMillan Press, 1987, p. 222.
  • Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. 177.
  • DeVeaux, Scott, Bebop: A Social and Musical History, p. 220.
  • Giddins, Gary, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Beech Tree Books, 1987, p. 66.
  • Gillespie, Dizzy, To Be, or not to Bop, with Al Fraser, Doubleday & Company, 1979, p. 87.
  • Gitler, Ira, Jazz Masters of the Forties, Collier Books, 1966, p. 175.
  • Gitler, Ira, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 52-53.
  • Feather, Leonard, Inside Jazz, Da Capo, 1977, p. 80.
  • Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: 43 Jazz Conversations, edited by Ben Sidran, Da Capo, 1995, p. 391-392, 339.
  • Hennessey, Mike, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
  • Owens, Thomas, Bebop: The Music and Its Players, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 10.
  • Paudras, Francis, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, Da Capo, 1986, p. 148.
  • Shipton, Alyn, Groovin' High: The Life and Music of Dizzy Gillespie, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 182.
  • Sidran, Ben, Talking Jazz: 43 Jazz Conversations, Da Capo 1995, p. 109.
  • Taylor, Art, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews, expanded edition, Da Capo, 1993, p. 189.
Periodicals
  • Down Beat, December 1963.
Other
  • Additional information for this profile was obtained from the liner notes to The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet: In Paris Festival International De Jazz, Columbia, 1977, and Our Man in Paris, Blue Note, 1962.

— John Cohassey

 
Quotes By: Kenneth Clarke

Quotes:

"Energetic action on debt would make a radical difference to the prospects of many of the poorest countries in the world, at no practical cost to creditor countries."

 
Wikipedia: Kenneth Clarke
The Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke

In office
27 September, 1993 – 2 May, 1997
Prime Minister John Major
Preceded by Norman Lamont
Succeeded by Gordon Brown

In office
10 April 1992 – 27 May 1993
Preceded by Kenneth Baker
Succeeded by Michael Howard

In office
2 November 1990 – 10 April 1992
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
John Major
Preceded by John MacGregor
Succeeded by John Patten

In office
25 July 1988 – 2 November 1990
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by John Moore
Succeeded by William Waldegrave

In office
13 July 1987 – 25 July 1988
Preceded by Norman Tebbit
Succeeded by Tony Newton

Born July 02 1940 (1940--) (age 67)
Flag of England Nottingham, UK
Political party Conservative
Alma mater Caius College, Cambridge

Kenneth Harry Clarke, QC, MP, (born 2 July 1940) is a prominent Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom. He is MP for Rushcliffe, near Nottingham. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993 until 1997, and a minister throughout all 18 years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997. He has contested the leadership of the party three times (in 1997, 2001 and 2005), being defeated each time.

Early Life

Born in Nottingham, England in 1940, Clarke was educated at Nottingham High School (then a "direct grant" school) and went on to study law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he graduated with a 2:1. He had joined the Conservatives while at university, where he was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. As a student, he controversially invited the former British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley to speak for a second year in succession,[1] leading some Jewish students (including his future successor at the Home Office Michael Howard) to resign from CUCA in protest. Clarke was defeated for the presidency of the Cambridge Union Society by Howard, although he was subsequently elected President of the Union a year later. In an early 1990s documentary journalist Michael Cockerell played Clarke tape recordings of himself speaking at the Cambridge Union as a young man; Clarke displayed amusement at the stereotypically upper class accent with which he spoke at the time.

On leaving Cambridge, Clarke was called to the Bar in 1963.

Member of Parliament

Clarke sought election to the House of Commons almost immediately after university. He cut his teeth by fighting the Labour stronghold of Mansfield in the 1964 and 1966 elections. In June 1970, at the age of 29, he gained the East Midlands constituency of Rushcliffe, south of Nottingham, from Labour MP Tony Gardner. Labour has never come close to winning the seat since, but Gardner's 1966 victory was partly due to the unpopular sitting Tory MP whom he defeated. Clarke has sat for Rushcliffe (on changed boundaries) ever since, making him by 2005 one of the longest serving of all MPs.

He was soon appointed a Government whip - from 1972 to 1974 - where he helped ensure that the Heath administration won key votes on entry to the European Community with the assistance of Labour rebels. Even though he opposed the election of Margaret Thatcher as party leader in 1975, he was appointed as her industry spokesman from 1976 to 1979, and then occupied a wide range of ministerial positions during her premiership, from 1979 onwards. He was appointed QC in 1980.

In the government

Clarke served as junior transport minister, and then as Minister of State for Health (1982-85). He joined the Cabinet as Paymaster General and Employment Minister (1985-87) (his Secretary of State, Lord Young, was in the Lords), and served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister at the DTI (1987-88), with responsibility for the Inner Cities ("because," as one wag put it, "he looked like he lived in one").

He was appointed Health Secretary in 1988, introducing the 'internal market' concept in the NHS, before being appointed Education Secretary in the final weeks of Thatcher's government, in the reshuffle caused by Sir Geoffrey Howe's resignation (the job had been offered to Norman Tebbit, who declined to return to the Cabinet). He was famously the first Cabinet minister to advise Thatcher to resign after her inadequate first-round performance in the November 1990 leadership contest; she referred to him in her memoirs as a "candid friend". He supported Douglas Hurd in the next round.

Despite the victory of John Major in that contest, he came to work with Thatcher's successor very closely, and quickly emerged as a central figure in his government. After continuing as Education Secretary (1990-92), where he introduced a number of reforms, he was appointed as Home Secretary in the wake of the Conservatives' unexpected victory at the 1992 general election. In May 1993, seven months after the impact of 'Black Wednesday' had terminally damaged the credibility of Norman Lamont as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Major forced Lamont to resign from that office and appointed Clarke in his place.

Chancellor of Exchequer

At first Clarke was seen as the dominant figure in the Cabinet, and at the October 1993 Conference he "defended" Major from his critics by announcing "Any enemy of John Major is an enemy of mine" in a manner widely seen as overbearing. By the time of the Redwood leadership challenge in June 1995 there were even rumours (always denied) that Major had offered the Exchequer to Heseltine.

Clarke enjoyed an increasingly successful record as Chancellor, as the economy recovered from the recession of the early 1990s and a new monetary policy was put into effect after Black Wednesday. He was able to reduce the basic rate of Income Tax from 25 to 23%, as well as reduce the share of GDP consumed by government spending, and halve the budget deficit[citation needed].

Differences of opinion within the Cabinet on European policy, on which Clarke was one of the leading pro-Europeans, complicated his tenure as Chancellor. Whereas other ministers such as Malcolm Rifkind wished to imply that British euro membership was unlikely, Clarke fought successfully to maintain the possibility that Britain might join a European single currency under a Conservative government, but conceded that such a move could only take place on the basis of a referendum. When the 'Eurosceptic' Party Chairman, Brian Mawhinney, (allegedly) briefed against him, on one occasion, Clarke memorably declared: "Tell your kids to get their scooters off my lawn" - an allusion to Harold Wilson's rebuke of trade union leader Hugh Scanlon in the late 1960s.

Clarke is president of the moderate, pro-European ginger group within the Conservative Party, Tory Reform Group.

Since the Conservatives entered Opposition in 1997, Clarke has stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party three times. In 1997, a vote exclusively among Members of Parliament, he topped the poll in the first and second rounds.

Failed Leadership Bids

In the third and final round he formed an alliance with Eurosceptic John Redwood, who would have become Shadow Chancellor and Clarke's deputy if Clarke had won the contest. This alliance of opposites earned Clarke little support from the eurosceptic right; Redwood was not able to deliver the votes of many of his followers after Lady Thatcher publicly endorsed Clarke's rival William Hague in a photocall outside the House of Commons, and the latter won the vote comfortably. The contest was criticised for not involving, except in an advisory role, the rank-and-file members of the party, where surveys showed Clarke to be more popular.

Ironically, in 2001, after coming first in the parliamentary ballot, Clarke lost in a final round among the rank-and-file membership—a new procedure introduced by Hague—to a much less experienced, but strongly Eurosceptic rival, Iain Duncan Smith. This loss, by a margin of 62% to 38%, was attributed to the former Chancellor's pro-European views being increasingly out of step with the dominant Euroscepticism of the party membership. In Opposition, Clarke has so far refused to accept any Shadow Cabinet position, having first been offered a senior role by Hague in 1997.

When Michael Howard stepped down after the Conservative's 2005 general election defeat, Clarke confirmed he would stand again for the position of party leader in autumn 2005, against the other expected contenders including Malcolm Rifkind, David Cameron, David Davis and Liam Fox. Refuting suggestions that at 65 he was too old to lead the party Clarke said that he was "overwhelmingly more popular" (amongst the voters at large) than his potential rivals. [2] Lord Tebbit accused Clarke of being "lazy" and said that voters would find his connections with the tobacco industry distasteful. [3]

Clarke's lack of involvement in front bench politics since 1997 meant that, unlike his leadership rivals, he was not associated with the policies and electoral failures of the Tory party under the leaderships of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. In his campaign speeches Clarke attacked Tony Blair's "catastrophic error" in involving the UK in the war with Iraq [4] and accused the government of being "autocratic". "We have a Prime Minister who is more George III than Clement Attlee", he said.[5]

An ICM opinion poll conducted for Newsnight on 5 September 2005 gave Clarke a 40% approval rating for leader (amongst the public) as against 10% for the man then perceived as his nearest rival, David Davis. Nevertheless, Clarke was knocked out in the first round of the 2005 leadership contest, effectively ending his ambition to become party leader. Clarke polled 38 votes against 42 for Liam Fox, 56 for David Cameron and 62 for David Davis. David Cameron became Conservative Leader after a run off with Davis in December 2005.

Cameron appointed Clarke to head a Democracy task force as part of his extensive 18-month policy review in December 2005, exploring issues such as the reform of the House of Lords and party funding.

As a backbencher, Clarke has taken a number of non-executive directorships and engaged in non-political media work, including serving as Deputy Chairman of British American Tobacco (BAT) (1998-2007) and Deputy Chairman of Alliance Unichem, and has faced allegations over the activities of BAT in lobbying the developing world to reject stronger health warnings on cigarette packets and evidence that his corporation has been involved in smuggling.[6] He has presented several series of jazz programmes on BBC Radio Four, including one on his namesake, bebop drummer Kenny Clarke.

Personal Life

Ken Clarke's principal interests are jazz, birdwatching, reading political history and watching most kinds of sport (he is a big fan of Nottingham Forest). He attended the 1966 World Cup final and claims (with a little jest) to have been influential in persuading the man known vernacularly as "the Russian linesman" Tofik Bakhramov (who was actually from Azerbaijan), to award a goal to Geoff Hurst when the England striker had seen his shot hit the crossbar of opponents West Germany and bounce down, leaving doubt as to whether the ball had crossed the line. Clarke's position in the Wembley crowd was right behind the linesman at the time, and he shouted at the official to award a goal. Clarke makes this claim in jest as Bakhramov understood no English at all.

Clarke is a former President of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and a keen follower of Formula one motorsport. As a director of the tobacco giant BAT he was involved with their Formula One team British American Racing and has attended Grands Prix in support of the BAR team. BAR was sold to Honda in 2005.

Clarke is a lover of Real Ale and has been a member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).

He married Gillian Edwards, also a Cambridge graduate, in November 1964. They have two children - a son, and a daughter.

External links

Wikisource
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Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801–present)
Preceded by
Antony Gardner
Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe
1970 – present
Incumbent
Political offices
Preceded by
John Gummer
Paymaster-General
1985–1987
Succeeded by
Peter Brooke
Preceded by
Norman Tebbit
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
1987–1988
Succeeded by
Tony Newton
Preceded by
Secretary of State for Social Services
John Moore
Secretary of State for Health
1988–1990
Succeeded by
William Waldegrave
Preceded by
John MacGregor
Secretary of State for Education and Science
1990–1992
Succeeded by
John Patten