‘The Funky Drummer’

Jazzanooga launches tribute to Clyde Stubblefield

While directing sellout performances of “The Wiz” this week, Jazzanooga founder Shane Morrow is also planning a four-part tribute to Chattanooga- born, legendary drummer Clyde Austin Stubblefield.

The tribute, “Bringin’ da Funk,” starts this weekend and will continue quarterly to Jazz Fest in April. Then Jazzanooga will offer a huge drumming camp that will be free for children.

Cleveland, Tenn ., drummer and founder of The Art of Noise, Yattie Westfield, is the first drummer featured in the tribute. He will perform in Waterhouse Pavilion at 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 29. Admission is a $10 donation and all proceeds go toward educational funding so that local youth may have free drum lessons.

Westfield will discuss how Stubblefield’s music influenced him and then play.

“He’s going to give us a performance that you will not believe. He plays the drums and the guitar at the same time. I’m serious,” Morrow says, laughing. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Stubblefield, who died Feb. 18, 2017, set the standard for funk drumming. In 2016, Rolling Stone magazine named him and fellow James Brown drummer John “Jabo” Starks the sixth-best drummers of all time. Stubblefield is one of the most sampled drummers in hip- hop, yet he was mostly unrecognized and uncompensated for his music.

Morrow says Stubblef ield was a self- taught drummer who learned to play by playing rhythmic patterns he heard while growing up around Chattanooga factories. He had no health insurance, and around 1990 when he got sick with bladder cancer, his bills topped $ 80,000. The late Prince was such a fan of Stubblefield’s that he paid it, even though the two of them never met. Prince asked that his act not be publicized; Stubblefield said nothing of it until after Prince’s death.

Stubblefield made his mark as a musician while playing with James Brown. Stubblefield played on several of James Brown’s hit recordings, including “I Got the Feelin’,” “Say it Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Ain’t It Funky Now” and the album “Sex Machine.”

Stubblefield’s solo in “Funky Drummer,” recorded in 1969 and released March 1970, laid hip-hop’s foundation. Public Enemy, Run D. M. C., LL Cool J, N.W.A., and Raekwon are among hip-hop artists and rappers who used his beats.

“I just felt we haven’t given this man the honor and the recognition that I think he should have,” said Morrow, “because he was from Chattanooga, born and raised and self-taught. But what makes him distinctive is that he is one of the most sampled musicians in history. So when we’re listening to hip-hop, and when it comes to certain beats, it’s him. It literally is him. He is the funky drummer.”

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Drummer Clyde Stubblefield.