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.
