Drum Sum - Buck Clarke

 

Drum Sum

Drums Sum

The Buck Clarke Quintet

Supervision: Ralph Bass

Cover: Don Bronstein

Recorded November 8, 1960, at Bell Sound Studios, New York

Argo LP 4007

Personnel: 

Buck Clarke - Bongos and Conga

Charles Hampton - Piano, Alto and Baritone Saxophones and Flute

Clement Wells - Vibraharp

Fred Williams - Bass

Roscoe Hunter - Drums

From the back cover: On these sides can be heard a remarkably variegated program of music, under the direction of a comparatively unknown but unquestionably promising young leader.

Buck Clarke was born 28 years ago in Washington, D.C., a city well-known as the birthplace of Mercer Ellington and his father. He has been playing bongos for 12 years, having enjoyed his professional indoctrination as a teenaged member of a carnival band, in which he had a working day running from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

After two years working as a single in New Orleans and a couple of years in the army, he worked with the Arnett Cobb combo, later returning to Washington and jobbing around locally. He is talented in many manual directions, for a while he was at the Smithsonian Institute, employed as an artist on the exhibits staff.

It was at a showing of his paintings of jazz musician s that Buck also unveiled his first combo, a trio featuring the present bassist, Fred Williams and a vibraharpist. A little later he hired a drummer, and the following year early in 1959, the protean Charles Hampton added many new dimensions to the group as it became a quintet.

It would be pretentious and inaccurate to claim that this beguilingly versatile unit presages the development of a Washington style of jazz. There is no evidence that the nation's capitol has had or ever will have a local style or improvisation or composition. It is sufficient that musicians in or from this city, beginning with Duke and other pioneers like Claude Hopkins all the way through to modernists like Bill Ports, Frank West, Osie Johnson, and Charlie Byrd, have made it an important center of creativity in the jazz idiom.

Much of the personality of the Buck Clarke quintet stems from the versatility of Charles Hampton, who contributes invaluably to its broad range of sounds by playing piano, alto saxophone, baritone sax and flute. Hampton, 30, is from Greenville, S.C. He began studying piano in 1946, spent three years at the Howard U. School Of Music, and later studied oboe at the Modern School Of Music, whose earlier students had included the above-mentioned Messers, Wess and Byrd.

The other constituent in the front line, Clement A. Wells, Jr., a skillful vibraharpist is the newest member of the quintet. Born in 1928, he studied trumpet and piano as a child, but became fascinated by the vibes on seeing Lionel Hampton, and says his greatest thrill was playing with him once at the Howard Theater. After high school he formed a combo, but in 1947 he took a day job in the post office. In the army in 1951-3 he played alto horn. He later went back to the stamp emporium but gladly gave up the gig on joining Buck's group in May, 1960. He names as his favorites Hamp, Milt Jackson, Cal Tjader and his predecessor in Buck's group, Don McKenzie.

Bassist Fred Williams, 30, took up music while serving in the air force, playing in Europe with USO shows and later gigging in New York for a year before returning to Washington and studying at Howard.

Roscoe Hunter, also a 30-year-old Washingtonian, has been playing professionally since 1949. He names Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, Shelly Manne and Art Blakey as the drummers who have inspired him most. – Leonard Feather

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