Drummer Mike Clark at Jazz Kitchen: Admired stylist in funk history heads star-spangled quartet

Mike Clark takes care of business here.

He didn't announce the set list as promised, but star drummer Mike Clark  conveyed his vocal troubles hoarsely, so that is a readily acceptable excuse.

The music was a top-drawer exhibition of his influential style, nonetheless. And the 78-year-old drummer was supported by three star-quality younger men: saxophonist Rob Dixon, organist Mike LeDonne, and guitarist Dave Stryker. I heard the first of two sets by this eminently compatible group Friday night at the Jazz Kitchen.

I'm sorry to say just one tune was familiar to me, though the capacity audience recognized another with its applause after the first couple of phrases — part of the legacy of his time with Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters band of the 1970s. [Here's Wikipedia's concise summary: The Headhunters band (with Mike Clark replacing Harvey Mason) worked with Hancock on a number of other albums, including Thrust (1974), Man-Child (1975), and Flood (1975), the latter of which was recorded live in Japan.] 

I couldn't quite come up with  the title of the piece I recognized until a friend supplied me with it after I returned home. Thelonious Monk's pieces are melodically quite distinctive, and I wonder about my usual failure to attached titles to them. I quickly recognize "I Mean You," because the title fits the tune's repeated tag. And the whole world knows "'Round Midnight."

So why not lead off first with brief praise for "Monk's Dream"? (I will resist assigning titles in the deep-coded manner of Anthony Braxton to the rest of the set.) The tune featured Dixon's best solo, insofar as I could hear in detail what creative changes he was making to the original. 

The layout of the quartet's performances meant that four- or eight-bar exchanges with the drummer were a rarity, and this tune had good dialogue between Stryker and Clark. There was a thrilling bout of wildness from LeDonne, who was making his Indianapolis debut.

The final piece in the set featured a chugging tempo, which brought from the organist penetrating staccato flashes and an abundance of tremolo flares. 

As for the leader, I loved how how he punctuated another fine Dixon solo as it wrapped up on the set's fifth number. The drummer's solos were consistently refreshing, despite the tendency of the Clark branch of jazz to encourage settling into a groove and not doing much besides confirming it. 

One of Clark's solos had him detaching the snare without missing a beat, so that he had four toms for the central part before converting that drum back to the snare-drum assault he's a master of. Elsewhere, I also liked the variety he gave the hi-hat cymbals, partially muffling them while laying down a rapid beat. He showed how intensity can be maintained while lowering the volume.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying the gig, no one more so than the leader, who praised the audience effusively as well as his superb colleagues. The scratchiness was confined to the vocal sphere, fortunately.

[Photo by Rob Ambrose]

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