Clark, Zilber reunite for a trio of concerts
Drummer and sax man showcase acclaimed new album, ‘Mike Drop’
Mike Clark hasn’t lived in the Bay Area for some four decades, but the New York-based drummer never cut his deep ties to the region.
Best known as an architect of East Bay funk for his work with Herbie Hancock in the mid-1970s, he’s always considered himself first and foremost a straightahead jazz player who thrives in acoustic small-group settings. Returning to the Bay Area for the first time in two years, he plays a series of gigs with Albany tenor saxophonist Michael Zilber, celebrating the release of their recent Sunnyside album “Mike Drop.”
As on the album, they’re joined by pianist Matt Clark and bassist Peter Barshay for performances Sunday at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Nov. 11 at the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab, and Nov. 18 at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
Itching to get out of Gotham after being grounded by the pandemic, Clark is thrilled to be heading back to the Bay Area. “I’ve still got relatives there and friends who I went to high school with,” he said, name-checking fellow drummer Vince Lateano, with whom he grew up in Sacramento.
“I’m a New York-style drummer, and the whole time I was in the Bay Area people said, ‘You’ve got to go to New York.’ I love it here and I love coming back. I can still do the Oakland funk thing if I need to.”
As a rising player on the East Bay scene in the mid-1960s, Clark found an ideal rhythm section foil in electric bassist Paul Jackson, who joined Hancock’s Headhunters and then recommended his buddy for the band. But long before they became ubiquitous on Hancock’s hit 1974 album “Thrust,” Clark and Jackson were all over the Bay Area airwaves on a radio ad they recorded for Everett & Jones BBQ that stayed in heavy rotation for years on soul station KDIA.
“We lived next door to Everett & Jones and the whole neighborhood heard us rehearsing all the time, so Mrs. Jones said I’ll feed you guys for two weeks free if you record us a song,” Clark recalled. “We wrote the chart on a napkin up against a wall while waiting for our ribs, as there was no place to sit. We ate, then immediately went to Ray Dobar’s Soul City two blocks away and recorded it.”
A longtime East Bay resident, Zilber shares his musical partner’s hard-swinging sensibility. Like Clark and Barshay, Zilber put in significant time on the New York scene before settling in the Bay Area. A bandleader and inveterately inventive arranger, he’s recorded critically hailed albums with saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master Dave Liebman and guitar maestro John Stowell.
Zilber connected with Clark about a decade ago “and quickly found we had a lot in common,” he said. “I love playing with Mike. He swings his butt off. What’s not to like?”
The musicians recorded “Mike Drop” after a run of gigs around the Bay Area in the winter of 2018. The album’s bracing immediacy reflects the fact they recorded in the same room at Oakland’s 25th Street Recording, which means what you hear is what they played in the moment.
“Unless it’s a train wreck, if I make a mistake I let it stand,” Clark said. “I don’t care if you hear my sticks click together. That’s what happened.”
The repertoire ranges across the jazz repertoire, with classic tunes by Thelonious Monk (“Monk’s Dream”), Wayne Shorter (“Miyako”) and McCoy Tyner (“Passion Dance”), as well as Zilber’s arrangements of Lennon and McCartney hits (“Blackbird” and “Norwegian Wood”), and his homages to fellow players (“Barshay Fly” and “Sonny Monk”).
With its strong reviews in the jazz press, including a four-outof-five-star rave in Downbeat, the album has helped boost the profile of Matt Clark, a fiery improviser highly regarded by his peers. Mike Clark first ran into him about 20 years ago at Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach and they ended up sitting in together on the same tune.
“We didn’t speak before we started to play, and I experienced his groove before he even started to solo,” Clark said.
While Clark lives to lay down that propulsive, cymbal-driven jazz pulse, he’s indelibly linked to the innovative funk fusion he played with Hancock. Thriving in the Bay Area accompanying masters like Woody Shaw, Bobby Hutcherson and Vince Guaraldi (with whom he played several times at Bach Dancing & Dynamite), Clark was reluctant to take the Headhunters gig.
In the end it wasn’t the money that sealed the deal. “He could only afford $350 a week and I was doing better than that in town,” Clark said. “But he said, ‘If you come with me, everybody in the world will know who you are.’ And that was true. I can go into a drum shop in Guam and people know me.”