Kenneth Clarke Spearman (January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985), known professionally as Kenny Clarke and nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was an important creator of the bebop style of drumming, being the first to use the ride cymbal to keep time instead of the hi-hat, and also used the bass drum for unexpected beats ("dropping bombs").
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and became an orphan when he was about five years old. With help from a teacher at his orphanage, he began playing drums when he was eight or nine years old. He became a professional musician in 1931 at age 17. Four years later, he moved to New York City, where he developed his drumming style and gained recognition. As the main drummer at Minton's Playhouse in the early 1940s, he took part in late-night music sessions that helped create bebop.
After serving in the military in the United States and Europe from 1943 to 1946, he returned to New York but lived mostly in Paris from 1948 to 1951. He stayed in New York for the next five years, performing with the Modern Jazz Quartet and playing on early recordings by Miles Davis. Clarke then moved permanently to Paris, where he performed and recorded with European and visiting American musicians. He led a big band with Francy Boland from 1961 to 1972. He continued to perform and record until shortly before his death from a heart attack in January 1985.
Biography
Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 9, 1914. He was the younger of two sons born to Martha Grace Scott, a pianist from Pittsburgh, and Charles Spearman, a trombonist from Waycross, Georgia. The family lived on Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill District of Pittsburgh.
Spearman left the household to start a new family in Yakima, Washington. Scott, 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. After trying a few brass instruments, Clarke (at the urging of a teacher) played snare drum in the orphanage's marching band at about age eight or nine. He also played the piano, on which his mother had taught him some simple tunes, as well as the pump organ at the parish church, for which he played hymns and composed pieces that were introduced there.
At age eleven or twelve, Clarke and his brother resumed living with their stepfather, who did not look favorably upon music or associating with those involved with it. Clarke dropped out of Herron Hill Junior High School at 15. Around the same time, their stepfather asked them to leave after an argument. Clarke was placed in a foster home without his brother, where he lived for about a year until his 16th birthday. He then worked various odd jobs while starting his music career. By age 17, he was a professional musician with the Leroy Bradley Band.
After touring with the Roy Eldridge band through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, he returned to the Bradley band based at the Cotton Club in Cincinnati. He stayed with them for two years, broken up by a two-month stint with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra. At the time, the orchestra included trumpeter Harry Edison and bassist Walter Page, who would later be featured in the Count Basie Orchestra. Around this time, Clarke took up the vibraphone with assistance from Adrian Rollini, a pioneer on the instrument.
In late 1935, Clarke moved to New York City, where he dropped the surname Spearman and became known as Kenny Clarke. He doubled on drums and vibes in a trio with his half-brother Frank, a bassist and guitarist who had recently moved to New York and likewise changed his surname to Clarke to benefit 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, Clarke 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 formed 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.
In his book Drummin' Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz, music critic Burt Korall writes of this time period: "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."
Clarke spent eight months playing drums and the vibraphone in Claude Hopkins's group before Gillespie gave Clarke an opening to join the Teddy Hill band in the Savoy Ballroom in 1939. While playing for this group on a fast tune, Clarke 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.
On the bass drum, he played irregular accents (dropping bombs) while using the hi-hat on the backbeats, adding more color to his drumming. With Gillespie, who encouraged this new approach to timekeeping, 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.
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. 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.
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.
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."
It was in this setting that Clarke and Monk co-wrote the jazz standard "Epistrophy," originally known as "Fly
Recognition
Clarke was honored as an NEA Jazz Master in 1983 and was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame through a vote by critics in 1988. In 2024, he was inducted into the Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Discography
- 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)
- refer to the recordings section of The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band
Worked with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin
Worked with J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding
Worked with the Modern Jazz Quartet
Worked with Jean-Christian Michel
Worked with Phineas Newborn Jr.