Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke

By Mike Hennessey

Book Overview

Of all the great, innovative musicians who contributed to the transformation of jazz in the early forties, Pittsburgh-born Kenny Clarke (1914-1985) was unquestionably one of the most influential. Born Kenneth Clarke Spearman, known as Kenny Clarke, later as Liquat Ali Salaam and, affectionately, as Klook, he redefined the role of the drummer in the jazz ensemble. Nobody in the history of jazz did more to convert the drums into a musical instrument. His was a fundamental contribution to the evolution of the music, and there is not a jazz drummer anywhere today who is not a custodian of Klook' s peerless legacy.
Klook' s creative intelligence and imagination left jazz infi-nitely richer. He was every musician's favorite drummer, and he played with all the giants: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, J. J. Johnson, Miles Davis-the list is almost a history of jazz itself.
Klook has been curiously neglected in the literature of jazz, perhaps because he spent more of his professional life in France than in the United States. Now Mike Hennessey, who has covered the international music scene for Billboard for more than twenty years, has written a sensitive biography that captures both the man and the musician.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822958090
• ISBN13: 9780822958093
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.0"