Legendary jazz-funk drummer Mike Clark presents his latest Hudson Music initiative - ‘The Post-Bop Drum Book’. Numerous topics include be-bop and post-bop drumming, advanced independence, developing the ride beat, phrasing, using the hi-hat as a fourth voice, and triplet variations are explained. Mike provides a totally complete overview of contemporary jazz drumming with performance concepts… Coupled with the impeccably written transcriptions of Towner Galaher… This is a must-have book for all serious drummers.

“He’s a great jazz drummer—and he hasn’t lost any of the stuff that he brought from Oakland. So now he’s totally free to do both, and he does. The solo he played on the album Thrust, on the song “Actual Proof,” is one of the best drum solos on any of my albums. So many people have remarked about that solo, saying, ‘Incredible.’”
- Herbie Hancock

Mike also gives us personal insight into his background and development, sharing his thoughts on developing your own voice, studying the masters, heritage and lineage, listening, communicating with other musicians, creativity, tuning, and much more. The total package is enhanced by audio and video files of Mike performing many of the examples from his book.

“I decided to write this book to explore the questions my students and others have brought me about my experience playing live acoustic music that is called jazz or, as my friend Nicholas Payton calls it, Black American Music (BAM). I chose to focus on my personal experience and experiments on the bandstand—my quest to find my own personal voice—rather than refer to famous drummers who have books out, or what I often see in other drumming studies. This book covers what I play and how that enables me to get to the soul/heart of the music quickly. Although "jazz" music is improvised, there is a real language and vocabulary based on jazz history. A crucial point that I emphasize is that the knowledge of and understanding of this history translates into a language that, expressed musically with others who share this knowledge, enables and elevates a musical conversation on a profound level. I will talk about phrasing, time - keeping, swinging, technique, and concepts concerning post-bop drumming. While I reach back into previous time periods in order to demonstrate how I reached these conclusions, the focus here is on post-bop drumming.

All great jazz drummers have vision and want to push the music forward while remaining in touch with the roots, and I will demonstrate how to tip your hat to history while offering fresh innovative contributions. I have been told my work on “Actual Proof” is a demonstration of this. I hope to serve the reader well—whether a student or a seasoned professional—and address some of the questions that I have been asked over the years”.

- Mike Clark

“Mike Clark is a great drummer. Even though he’s young enough to have come of age after Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette had already made their mark — and old enough to not be one of the “young lions” or that 80s generation of drum technocrats — he still managed to find “his own style” as Herbie Hancock advised him to do. Not only did he find his own style, he helped to create and refine a new language of funk drumming that combined the best of jazz and R&B. While I first got to know Mike’s playing by way of his highly original sophisti-funk stylings, it was through hearing him play be-bop that I came to appreciate the full measure of his drumming. Mike Clark lives and breathes the drums. He came to the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (where I teach), and his master class was as informative as his enthusiasm was contagious. He made sure that we all knew how to play a shuffle before he was finished. (I learned a great beat from him that night …). And Mike’s teaching method in this excellent new book will make certain that the reader gains more insight into swing, be-bop and post-bop drumming, and where all of that met the funk in the 1970s, than he or she might otherwise get to know. Audio and video files (included) help to drive Mike’s knowledge home. This book comes along at a good time. I still regard those halcyon days as being an incredibly exciting moment in music, with much of that excitement thanks to Mike Clark’s drumming. This book is, literally, a “time machine.” Strap-in and dig the ride.”
– Peter Erskine

“A great perspective on how to render the tradition from the mind that gave us Actual Proof”
– Lenny White

The Education of Mike Clark

“My dad was a drummer, but he stopped playing in his twenties. He had a great collection of jazz records and played them constantly: Basie, Duke, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Krupa, Wynonie Harris, Louie Jordan, stuff like that. This was his party music and he always had friends over.

There was always a set of drums in the house. I had been hearing jazz, and jump blues, before I could walk or talk. I guess my brain internalized it. When I was about four years old, I went over to the drums, sat down and played and it all made sense. I played a Krupa-like tom-tom thing; my parents were shocked and overjoyed. My Dad said it sounded professional and swung, so that same night he took me to a club where a band he used to play with was working. I sat in and played “Sweet Georgia Brown,” took a solo and got house.

Later, in grade school, I joined the school bands and they put me in dance band right away, which was like a small big band. My Dad had me playing with his friends who had gigs and he got me in as kind of a novelty solo child drummer in night clubs in and around Sacramento. Within a year or so, we moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father worked for the railroad and traveled a lot, so he would take me to clubs and concerts all over the country, and I met professional musicians and played with many of them, either sitting in, or as a child soloist.

He really loved Louis Prima and took me to many of Prima's shows and I met Bobby Morris and Paul Ferrara, both drummers that played with Louie Prima and The Wild Bunch. My Dad introduced me to them and they would show me different stickings and things—which I could play, even at that age. Older jazz musicians talked to me about the ride cymbal and how to comp for a soloist. I heard Barrett Deems, drummer with Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson—there were so many great drummers, especially in New Orleans and Texas.

I met drum great Paul Guerrero and he'd have me come to his gig at a club called The Chalet in Dallas and sit in. I also would sit in at The Famous Door in NOLA and played with trumpet players Mike Lala and Murphy Campo who both had groups at this club. I even played there with Mac Rebbenack, aka Dr. John, when he played bass with Murphy. I sat in with Frogman Henry at The Court of Two Sisters, and got to know a drummer named Dick Johnson, who helped me meet people to play with. I once had a gig as a soloist with the Paul Neighbors Big Band at the Blue Room in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. I would come in and play "Sing, Sing, Sing," "April in Paris," "Sweethearts on Parade," "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" and "Sweet Georgia Brown." My Dad and I did this in many towns and states, all over the country, although he traveled mostly in the South.

Then, when I was about 11, my Dad brought home an Art Blakey record, not knowing who he was—he saw a drummer on the cover and picked it up. We played it and right away, I was forever hooked. This led me to Bird, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and all the rest of the bebop and post-bop greats. I immediately sought out young musicians around my age who were interested in bebop and started trying to play this style. I played to my records for years and sought out every chance to play with musicians at any age. By the time I was in junior high school, I was doing jazz gigs and playing live. By high school, I was a working musician. When I graduated, I played in road bands all around California, the West Coast, and Nevada. In Lake Tahoe, Reno, and Vegas, I did lounge bands and heard all the legends that were around there then, like Sonny Payne, Buddy Rich, Harry James, Sam Woodyard, and Vido Musso. I watched these guys every night!

Soon, Vince Guaraldi hired me to play with him, which I did on and off for ten years. Through Vince, I met and played with Mose Allison, O.C. Smith, Joe Farrell, Chet Baker, Teddy Edwards, Jon Hendricks, Sonny Stitt, and many more. Around that time I was playing with my own organ group three nights a week plus Sunday sessions for about four years and was gaining lots of experience and learning how to play the music. I also played with Woody Shaw, Bobby Hutcherson, and Andrew Hill, and many artists from the East Coast called me.

I met Lenny White, and he was a huge influence on my playing, as were Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, and Jack DeJohnette. Prior to this I was into Art Blakey, Max Roach, Roy Haynes and Philly Joe Jones for bebop and Sonny Payne, Papa Joe Jones, Buddy Rich, and almost every big band drummer that was ever recorded. I later got into Billy Hart, Tootie Heath, Mickey Roker, Grady Tate, and pretty much anyone who played jazz. I listened to avant garde, post-bop, bebop everything. I loved John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Joe Henderson, Hampton Hawes, Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Herbie Hancock, Jackie McClean, Grachan Monchur, Andrew Hill, Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, Albert King, Little Milton, Little Johnny Taylor—I can't name all the musicians who influenced me since that would take an entire book by itself. I would go out and hear each one of these guys on nights when I wasn't working and ask them questions or watch every move they made. I would buy them drinks and just talk to them, listening to every thing they said, observing how they dressed, how they walked, their swag. I listened to how the master drummers played the ride cymbal very carefully and how they interacted with the band; what kind of grease they were putting on things and how to achieve that.

Now I also, at one point, had played a lot of blues gigs with the likes of Albert King, Albert Collins, Jimmy Reed, Delbert McClinton, and Jimmy Hughes. I could play most of the James Brown-type beats without practicing them. I could hear it and play them immediately. I just had a knack for the funky thing, and because of that, I got a lot of calls to play funk and did some of that as well. In high school, I played with Bobby Freeman, a soul singer, with Sly Stone on guitar. I met Paul Jackson in the late ’60s, and we became great friends. We shared a house together in Oakland, did a ton of gigs, and we had our own way of communicating rhythm. Doing many organ trio gigs: playing “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” or Horace Silver's more funky pieces, I started developing my signature funk beats. Night by night on the gig, they were pouring out. I never practiced them, it just happened on the gigs. I could really make the crowd dance and feel it. The organ players loved the beats and how they grooved, so I kept doing it. When Herbie heard me play he hired me to join Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters and the rest is history. The contribution I made on the piece “Actual Proof” drew on all of my jazz influences, especially, at that time Lenny White, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette, Roy Haynes, Max Roach, and Philly Joe, all run through my personal blender and spread over my Oakland funk beats.”

-Mike Clark

Mike Clark has performed with Herbie Hancock , Christian McBride, Chet Baker, John Scofield, Gil Evans, Nicholas Payton, Tony Bennett, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Eddie Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Vince Guaraldi, Woody Shaw, Donald Harrison, Albert King, Larry Coryell, Michael Wolff, Wallace Roney, Billy Childs, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Chris Potter, Bobby McFerrin, , Nat Adderley , Oscar Brown Jr., and many others. He has also recorded numerous albums as a leader. His latest is Mike Clark – Indigo Blue Live at the Iridium.