Bass man handing down legacy

Photo by Steven Parke

Bassist Stanley Clarke presents his Grammy-winning Stanley Clarke Band project on Saturday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre.

One of the most celebrated careers in jazz started by a process of elimination.

Stanley Clarke, the award-winning bassist and composer who performs Saturday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, was a schoolboy in Philadelphia in the 1960s when he decided to sign up for an after-school music program.

"I got there late, and the only things that were left were a bass drum, a sousaphone and an acoustic bass in the corner," says Clarke, 60. "I knew I didn't want to carry the bass drum and definitely not the sousaphone. The acoustic bass was the lesser of the three evils. I went and grabbed that, and it was a horrible-sounding instrument. I think I've spent my life since trying to make the acoustic bass sound good."

He has succeeded by any measure. Through his many collaborations like the '70s fusion band Return To Forever, his solo albums, and even his Emmy-award-winning soundtrack work, Clarke has not just mastered the acoustic, or upright or double bass, but also (along with the late Jaco Pastorius and a handful of others) revolutionized the role of the electric bass guitar.

"I remember when I started playing the bass, there were very few bass players who made their own records," says Clarke, marking the line between the instrument's traditional role of filling out the low end to its becoming a full, integrated part of the harmonic mix. "When I made my first solo album, Children of Forever, in 1973, maybe there were a handful of guys that had records out, and now -- it's a scary thought -- if you look globally, there's probably 1,000 guys who have made records as bass soloists. They're not all great, but I give them all an 'A' for effort."

After graduating from the Philadelphia Musical Academy, Clarke, while still just a teenager, moved to New York and started his career gigging and recording with such respected veterans as Pharoah Sanders and Stan Getz. In Getz's band, Clarke met pianist Chick Corea, who tapped him to play bass in Return To Forever, a jazz-fusion touchstone with which Clarke still performs. The group recently wrapped up a tour and will reunite this month for a series of New York shows that are part of Corea's 70th birthday celebration.

Beginning in the '70s, Clarke began making a series of solo albums, including 1976's School Days, which remain required listening for students of the bass. And in recent years he has alternated TV and film work ("Boyz n the Hood," "What's Love Got To Do With It") with high-profile projects like Animal Logic with Stewart Copeland of the Police, the Rite of Spring with Al Di Meola and Jean Luc Ponty, and his ongoing, multidisc collaboration with keyboardist George Duke.

The sum total of his body of work recently earned Clarke the Montreal International Jazz Festival's prestigious Miles Davis Award, whose previous recipients have included Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Dave Holland, Joe Zawinul and Pat Metheny. And Clarke is currently preparing a six-CD box set covering his solo work for 2012 release.

As the late-career praise and accolades come rolling in, Clarke says he has settled into a new phase of his career: Playing mentor, much like Getz, Sanders and others did for him, to a new generation of musicians.

"There's a sort of unspoken tradition in jazz music ... which is to pass things down," says Clarke. "If you look at a lot of the jazz greats like Art Blakey, Miles Davis -- if you look at all of them in their groups, they always had younger musicians."

To help develop new artists, Clarke recently started Roxboro Records, a label (named for an alma mater) devoted to developing young talents like guitarist Lloyd Gregory and composer Kennard Ramsey.

"Our label's not for everyone," says Clarke, who sees the venture less in commercial than artistic terms. "If you're someone who says I'm going to buy a new house and send my kids to school and get a Roll Royce all through making this CD, we're not the label for you. But if you're a serious musician devoted to your craft who wants to make a record, we are."

And then there is the Stanley Clarke Band, a group of mostly young, up-and-coming musicians that includes drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. and keyboardist and Roxboro signee Ruslan Sirota, who will both be performing with him here Saturday.

"I had played with these young guys for awhile, so when it came time to make another record, I just pulled them in with me," Clarke says of the making of the group's self-titled debut, which won the Grammy earlier this year for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. "I was really happy for the guys when we won the Grammy. I was in Sydney, Australia, when it happened and watched the guys walk up there to pick up the award. It was really cool because its rare today that a young musician can join a band, work really hard at it, and that culminates with him up on a stage in Los Angeles picking up a Grammy."

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The Stanley Clarke Band

8 p.m. Saturday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, 1801 Exeter. Tickets: $25, $35 and $45; available at the box office, by phone at (910) 751-7500, and online at gpacweb.com.

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