Stanley Clarke interview: “What you wanna retire for? Think of all the jazz musicians that have come before me that played until the last note”

The 2007 edition of the Barbados jazz festival was a 'past, present and future' affair. A young pianist called Robert Glasper made a splash with music that captured the imagination of hip-hop millennials, while vocalist Anita Baker brought the island’s 1980s soul massive to its feet. But the gig that knocked punters sideways was by Stanley Clarke, the shape-shifting bass legend who first came to prominence back in the 1970s.

At Farley Hill National Park, an old plantation with a stage for open air concerts, Clarke finished a raucously funky set by stepping on to a small runway that launched out to the adoring masses. A casually dressed Moses, he parted the sea of people. Such was the engulfing noise that the crowd seemed to ascend to groove heaven itself.

“I do remember playing there, and going into the audience, and things getting a little, er, crazy,” Clarke chuckles down the line from his home in Topanga, California.

“At some point people were moving, and it just seemed incomplete for me to not go out there,” he continues. “You can tell when an audience is prepared to sit there and listen to Beethoven, but if you make that first step and get that first bit of energy back you know it right away. It just really depends. When I get on the stage I kind of sense the audience, a general collective feeling of where the audience is at. You could play Carnegie Hall and sense an audience that’s very serious. At the same time, you can go and play Carnegie Hall and sense if an audience wants to party, or they’re very playful. I can’t explain what the indicators are, other than you just feel it.”

Crowd pleaser: Clarke onstage (photo: Toshi Sakurai)

Granted, but the spontaneity that Clarke showed some 16 years ago in the Caribbean also fuels a bigger debate on the nature of performance, and the putative divide between art and entertainment, solemnity and showmanship, for he knows all too well that the lines have been crossed many times, certainly in the long history of black music. As far as Clarke is concerned, the big question is one of self-perception as well as context.

“I’ve done (the Barbados thing) in other places too. I’ve never really taken myself seriously on stage,” he says. “When I practiced all the years and developed whatever I did, that was a serious thing. But if it’s one thing I like about being, I guess a jazz musician, or whatever you wanna call it, there’s nothing that’s preset.”

British audiences will have a chance to engage with Clarke in whatever mode he feels appropriate, be it ‘light or heavy’, or possibly both, when he headlines at this month’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and the gig can go any number of ways, partly because of the huge amount of material the 71 year-old has at his disposal. Highlights of his career, which stretches back to the late 1960s, include membership of pioneering jazz-rock combo Return To Forever, alongside pianist-founder Chick Corea (who, like Clarke, fully embraced new technology), as well as a number of acclaimed solo albums that blurred the acoustic-electric line, such as the superbly elegiac Children Of Forever, featuring vocalists Andy Bey and Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Journey To Love, which had contributions from another fine pianist (and also vocalist), George Duke, and Jeff Beck. Clarke would continue to tread a path between improvisation, funk, R&B and pop, enjoying commercial success with several albums on which he occasionally sang as well as played, above all School Days and Rocks, Pebbles and Sand.

In the 1980s, 90s and 2000s he appeared frequently in the ‘straightahead’ world, deploying his formidable technique on double bass with the likes of McCoy Tyner and Patrice Rushen, but also switched to bass guitar on various sessions, including a summit meeting with two players for whom he partly paved the way, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten. Clarke also wrote many film scores, from Boyz N The Hood to Barbershop, both chronicles of African-American life that were, in the case of the former, socially conscious; and the latter, goofily escapist. He has distinguished himself as one of the most versatile bassists in jazz history, as adept on acoustic as electric, but is also a composer with an eclectic repertoire. In concert, Clarke thus promises a combination of his many distinct imprints. “I know hardcore fans always wanna hear the older stuff,” he reflects with a measured tone. “Some people come for the songs, some people come for the virtuosic stuff, and there are fans that come for both. Most come for both, but we might also take a standard and put our own twist on it.”

Clarke (far right) with his new band N 4EVER (l-r): Jahari Stampley, Emilio Modeste, Jeremiah Collier  and Colin Cook (photo: Toshi Sakurai)

Whatever the songbook on the night, chances are that Clarke will be anything but ring rusty, as he already has, at a liberal estimate, some 75 dates scheduled for this year. Which is no mean feat for a man in the early stage of his eighth decade. He willingly concedes that there was a time when the studio became more of his natural habitat than the stage, but he is well aware of the historical lineage he is in.

“I think when I reached right around my mid-60s and I was doing a lot of film composing, I was thinking maybe I should retire from touring. Then something came over me, like I had this imaginary hammer hit me in the head. Are you crazy? What you wanna retire for? You feel good, you’re healthy. And why not play? Think of all the jazz musicians that have come before me that played ‘til the last note. That’s kind of what we do.”

Clarke’s band N 4EVER, is becoming aware of that. It features musicians who are more than half his age, including keyboardist Jahari Stampley and alternate keyboardist, the highly-rated Georgian pianist Beka Gochiashvili, whom Clarke refers to as ‘a little genius’, two Virginians in saxophonist Emilio Modeste and guitarist Colin Cook, and Chicago drummer Jeremiah Collier.

Philadelphia-born Clarke, who trained at the city’s School Of The Performing Arts, was once in their position, going out into the world to build a career. He moved to New York in his early twenties and landed gigs with several legends who all helped him to become the artist he is today. He is happy to recall his formative years and state how privileged he feels that things have come full circle. Now he is a master and mentor.

“It’s great, and it’s another reason I do it,” Clarke says emphatically. “Because it was something that was done for me. I was very fortunate that the guys I played with really took care of me… Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Stan Getz (whose quartet featured both Clarke and Chick Corea). At one point they were young, and those guys instinctively knew that what moves instrumental music, or jazz, or whatever you wanna call it, through time is not how much a radio station plays it.

“What moves it is that it gets passed down, a very African kind of concept, though a lot of other cultures have it too. You pass the music down! These guys that play with me, the drummer is 22, I tell ‘em one day you’re gonna have your own band and I try to tell them what guys told me. Each person I could write a book about. Like Horace Silver, he was one of Chick’s favourite musicians, and he taught me about being a complete bandleader, because he was the 'demo kit' on how to lead a band. His charts were written out so well they looked like they came out of a computer back then, his handwriting was so clear. He really made rehearsing a thing, talking to each person in the band and giving advice on what you should do on each one of those songs.

“Then we played the songs you really heard it. We sounded good. And Chick was like that when we played together; he took a lot of time to make sure that everybody understood what he wrote and why he wrote it. And how to get it to sort of happen, and I do that. I know these young guys are watching me and that one day they’re gonna do that with their own bands. I’ve had a couple of hundred people come through my bands since I’ve had a band. My first one was when I was probably 18 or 19 years old. One drummer called me up the other day and said, ‘Man, I finally realise why you were screaming at me!’ And I said ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is’.”

While the Cheltenham appearance offers audiences a chance to see Clarke lead what is the latest of many groups, fans old and new will be able to either reacquaint themselves with, or discover, highlights of his voluminous back catalogue later in the year when a second anthology is issued. It shows the stylistic breadth of Clarke’s output, which has taken him from hard bop to hard funk via Latin grooves and all points in between. But in addition to being a notable musical chameleon, Clarke is one of the musicians who both lived through and contributed to epochal changes in jazz.

Along with Jaco Pastorius and the somewhat unheralded Alphonso Johnson, Clarke helped to create a new vocabulary for the bass guitar in the 1970s and was at the forefront of a major overhaul of the timbral landscape of Return To Forever, which went from a lithe, acoustic, often Brazilian sway in its first incarnation (where Clarke and Corea were joined by Airto Moreira, Flora Purim and Joe Farrell) to a tougher, starker electric screech in which guitarists Al Di Meola and Bill Connors made their presence felt. They captured the imagination of younger listeners, many of whom were rock fans hungrily tuning into the high decibel fantasia of the likes of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham and Larry Coryell. Perhaps inevitably there was flak from parts of the jazz press that baulked at the notion of plugging in.

“There were some critics who wished we had stayed acoustic,” Clarke says. “But that’s always the case. I learned at a very young age that change is a very important thing and is always attributed to jazz musicians, even though it’s a truth and a fact that many times when you do change you set yourself up for criticism. That’s part of the territory. But change is what propels us into the future, we carry whatever came before us and we bring that along and it evolves. It’s a very important thing to respect change, but sometimes you have to recognise that change can be terrible,” says Clarke, making a statement that might draw a snigger from those unenthused by the romantic warrior bombast that would mark some of the latter recordings of Return To Forever.

“But you gotta give the guy an ‘A’ for effort because you have to change, and then maybe later the very thing he was looking to do… that thing that was terrible was just a step to get somewhere now. But you can’t not change,” he says, his low voice becoming audibly commanding. “It’s illogical when you think how life works. If you’re doing something and you’re moving forward in life then you have to do something new.”

There are several kindred spirits who shared that vision. And while Clarke, somewhat inevitably, hails Miles Davis as the ultimate embodiment of artist as evolutionary and revolutionary creature, the musicians with whom he had creative partnerships that stretched out over decades still remain uppermost in his thoughts. Clarke is currently busy putting the finishing touches to the aforementioned compilation of his own music, but he tells me that he is also hard at work wrapping up the mixes of the final concert he performed with George Duke before the keyboardst's untimely death in 2013. Then again, the loss of Chick Corea in 2021 was also something he keenly feels to this day.

“It was very hard,” he says “Losing George and Chick was very tough for me because I had spent a lot of time with those guys. Every show I play a George Duke song.”

Indeed Clarke is keen to stress the ongoing relevance of tunes associated with a particular individual, be it any number of Corea anthems, such as ‘500 Miles High’, or a Duke classic such as ‘Reach For It.’ And as much as the bassist recognises the need for unconditional dedication to an instrument to reach the high standards of excellence sought by any notable soloist, he is at pains to state that it is not only countless hours in a practice room that leads to the development of a virtuoso, as opposed to a proficient player.

Or, as he puts it, a drummer ‘going rat a tat tat’ every day’ is only one part of an artist’s development. By Clarke’s reckoning the question of repertoire, of learning material and being able to place it in a specific historical context, is a paramount one. Which partly leads to the ages old debate of ‘chops’ versus communicative energy, self-indulgence vs accessibility, head vs heart. Uppermost in Clarke’s mind is a belief in melody as well as a faith in a good old-fashioned tune.

“[The up and coming musician] he has to play a number of songs to put that technical ability, that skill, to the framework of a song, the concept of a musical language, and that’s how the guy gets better,” he says earnestly, without breaking his flow. “All the great musicians in the world, the Herbie Hancocks and the rest, they can play but what we like about Herbie… it’s his songs. It’s kind of the same with some rock and pop musicians too. We just lost a great friend of mine, Jeff Beck. Nobody played like him, and he understood the value of a song. So he searched out songs and worked with a lot of different people, Jeff understood the power of a song. That never stops.”

This interview originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today