When world-renowned bass player and composer Stanley Clarke walks onto a stage, people listen. That’s what happened this week as he started a three-year residency at the BroadStage. He began with a master class for Santa Monica College (SMC) students on Tuesday, and will perform a sold-out show this weekend with pianist Hiromi.
Clarke says as part of the residency, he’ll perform a few times a year. “I’ll bring artists in. … And we're talking about possibly taking one of my film scores, maybe the John Singleton movie ‘Boys n the Hood,’ and doing that here with live music to the movie.”
He values the work he’ll do with students from SMC and Santa Monica High School, because when he was that age, he got help from greats such as Stan Getz and Art Blakey. “I was fortunate, I started at 18 playing with really serious musicians. And if a lot of those guys didn't take time to show me certain things like, ‘Stanley don't do it this way, try it this way,’ I might not have turned out to be the musician that I am now,” he says.
Clarke had been on a classical path, attending the Philadelphia Music Academy, until a run-in with Chick Corea changed everything. He recalls, “He came to my school. And he said, ‘Man, you don't want to do that. Yeah, there’s Bach and Beethoven, but man, we have the opportunity: Corea and Clarke, we can write our own music.’”
Clarke then left the Philadelphia Music Academy and started writing jazz with Corea. “I really miss Chick. We had our band, and our time together was very much like a traveling university,” he says.
Stanley Clarke works with SMC students. Photo by Giuliana Mayo.
Bass players are often referred to as part of the rhythm section, but Clarke describes their role in a band differently. “The bass player is the guy that's in the middle of a concentric circle, even more so than a drummer because the bass player has a special role. He brings harmony and rhythm together. And he does this all the time, the bass player never stops.”
He explains further: “A great way to really understand it is if you take a song like ‘My Girl’ by the Temptations and listen to James Jamerson, that ‘deet doo doo, deet doo doo.’ You recognize those songs by the baselines. You don't think of it like, ‘Oh, wow, that's a great baseline.’ You just recognize it because the bass brings the rhythm, and it lets you know where the tonal center is.”
From classic oldies to today, Clarke, who plays both electric and upright bass, says the instrument is changing. “What a lot of bass players have done is they've educated themselves heavily in music in many cases, much more than other players that play other instruments. And so they wanted to write music, and I was one of them. I was one of the early guys to write some melody on the bass…And it's great because lots of people enjoy that expansion and further achievement in music.”
Clarke will be working to expand minds and entertain audiences on the Broad Stage through 2026.