Stanley Clarke

Clarke has been explicit about where the signature slap on "School Days" actually came from, and it isn't him. "I had heard Larry do it and I thought, 'Wow, that's really something,'" he said of the Sly and the Family Stone bassist, recalling how Return to Forever's drummer Lenny White then showed him a rough version of the technique on bass. "A lot of people think that I invented this thing. Not true." Clarke worked Graham's thumb-and-pop idea into something entirely his own on the song that became his signature.

listen: upstream & heresource: National Endowment for the Arts — Stanley Clarke, 2022 NEA Jazz Master profile & podcast transcript (bio, Larry Graham, Eligio Rossi) ↗share

1970

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)Larry Graham

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1976

School DaysStanley Clarke

listen forOn "Thank You," Graham's thumb thumps the low string like a kick drum while his fingers snap the high ones into a popped counter-rhythm -- the two-handed percussive vocabulary Clarke absorbed secondhand. "School Days" takes that same thump-and-pop pulse and turns it into a full melodic instrumental voice, the bassline itself becoming the tune rather than sitting under one; where Graham's slap drives a groove, Clarke's carries a whole song.

Asked outright who most influenced him, Clarke didn't reach for a fellow fusion player -- he named the acoustic bassist behind Miles Davis's mid-1960s quintet. "The stuff Ron Carter did with Miles Davis is truly genius," he said. "He shifted the paradigm from the guys before him... nothing like a virtuoso soloist, but really interesting." Clarke calls Carter, still the most-recorded bassist in jazz, someone "you'd want to pattern yourself after." It's a debt to an approach -- melodic, inventive, harmonically sure-footed -- more than to any one recording.

listen: upstream & heresource: Vice/Noisey — Stanley Clarke Is the Reason You Love Music (Ron Carter, Eligio Rossi) ↗share

1965

Eighty-OneRon Carter

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1975

Song to JohnStanley Clarke

listen forCarter co-wrote "Eighty-One" with Davis, and his bassline does more than walk the changes -- it shapes the tune's harmonic motion, almost arguing with the horns. There's no single Clarke recording tied to that song, but "Song to John," his own acoustic-bass elegy for Coltrane, works the same way: a line built to carry melody and harmony together rather than just keep time, the open, unhurried tone Clarke has said belongs to his "real" instrument.

For five years at Philadelphia's Settlement Music School, an Italian-born teacher Clarke called "my little Roman friend" drilled him through classical double-bass fundamentals, paddle in hand for wrong notes. "Old school Italian guy, you played a wrong note and he'd hit you with a paddle," Clarke said. "But I'm glad I had him as a teacher because definitely my fundamentals were put in." Decades later, bowing a piece for his wife, Clarke was still drawing on that training -- fulfilling, in his own telling, Rossi's own prediction: "One day you'll teach."

listen: upstream & heresource: National Endowment for the Arts — Stanley Clarke, 2022 NEA Jazz Master profile & podcast transcript (bio, Larry Graham, Eligio Rossi) ↗share

No known recordingEligio Rossi

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1974

Spanish Phrases for Strings and BassStanley Clarke

listen forNo recording of Rossi survives; his side of this is testimony only. What's audible on "Spanish Phrases for Strings and Bass" is what stuck: a bowed, legato passage inside an otherwise plucked, funk-inflected album, phrased with the pitch discipline and formal patience of conservatory training rather than a jazz solo's looseness -- what Clarke elsewhere calls "a real classical background" he was "going to go forward with."