Location: Ljubljana / Križanke / Slovenia
Date: Tuesday, 09.07.2019
For any true music gourmet, a visit from the legendary bassist and double bassist Stanley Clarke to Ljubljana is a kind of mandatory holy communion. You don’t skip or miss opportunities like this. Just one day after the show by his good friend Marcus Miller at Ljubljana’s Križanke, we headed once again to Plečnik’s famous temple of arts and culture. And already heavy drops are gathering above us again. Is it going to pour from the sky once more? It’s ten past nine in the evening, and the legendary bassist was greeted by a packed Križanke. Another great turnout. And the rain has started, too. Again…
Stanley Clarke is a living music legend and one of the most important bassists who, around the turn of the sixties into the seventies and especially throughout the seventies, with their exploratory, compositional approach, popularized playing the bass guitar and the double bass, particularly in the jazz and rock fusion format. Return to Forever! Of course. That’s one of those bands that flung wide open new musical spaces and horizons, and left behind a body of work so inspiring that the fascination of new generation after new generation of musicians just doesn’t fade. It’s an evergreen process and phenomenon that keeps going and going.
Stanley arrived at Križanke with a five-piece backing crew made up of: Beka Gochiashvili (piano, keyboards), Evan Garr (violin), Cameron Graves (keyboards), Salar Nader (tabla, percussion) and Shariq Tucker (drums). The crew had just ploughed through an extraordinary run of shows together and showed up at Križanke truly “in tune,” razor-sharp in performance, and, like a flawlessly oiled machine, delivered an unforgettable adventure of a concert that carries you away, enchants you and leaves you properly stunned. You really can’t expect anything else from the name Stanley Clarke.
This time Stanley Clarke played the Slovenian capital with his own band for the first time. He has performed here before, though. He first visited Ljubljana way back in 1975, when he sold out Hala Tivoli with Return to Forever, and in 2009 he came back to us once more. That time he played in the company of two Return to Forever comrades, pianist Chick Corea and drummer Lenny White, at Ljubljana’s Cankarjev dom.
Clarke has always ensured an exceptional level of musicality within compositions that are loosened up in a jazzy way, along with an expressive attitude that is a distinctive, palpable reflection of his pioneering days in jazz-rock fusion, where he comes from. The show was opened by School Days, which the band used as an opening warm-up, and where the crew instantly showed an incredible level of virtuosity, stunning hand skills, and top-notch chemistry born of superb mutual awareness and polished execution. Stanley already hinted here at everything you can squeeze out of a bass guitar, hopping between different bass-playing techniques as if it were nothing. His wrist position, set at a right angle to the strings while the lower part of the arm runs in an almost horizontal line with the body of the bass, is an absolute one-off and a co-creator of the musician’s uniqueness, giving him unbelievable agility. Several times he let drummer Shariq Tucker take the front, and he, through extraordinary kinetics and unstoppable twisting energy, completely exploded all over the drumheads right from the start. With lines of struck chords, Stanley a few times laid down a tangible level of thematic structure, into which violinist Evan Garr slotted superbly, livening up the number with improvisations. The percussion boosted the incredible rhythmic drive, and Stanley then moved back a bit, grabbed his double bass and sat down on a bar stool. The percussion and drums held the opening rhythm, which, alongside Stanley Clarke’s built-up motif, gradually flowed into the fantastic jazz fusion composition called Brazilian Love Affair. It was created by George Duke, and Stanley dedicated it to him. The integration of salsa, or Latin rhythm, was noticeable. A piece lasting over twenty minutes, full of unexpected twists and incredible communication between the players, carried the audience through the rain on the wings of the unique vibes of this refined, accomplished musician and his companions. When bass or double bass playing literally speaks. Stanley then treated himself to an especially extended jam number, in which he took us even deeper into the core of his command of the double bass. Even though it was raining, people had of course come to Križanke well prepared for the rain, but in this case they’d have been fine even if they hadn’t. The magic of the sextet’s playing carries you away, and that annoying drizzle, which the protective canvas once, in better and healthier times, thankfully used to stop, was forgotten in an instant.
Next, Stanley Clarke and the crew also played Charles Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. The sextet didn’t forget to deliver the “kick-ass” original No Mistery, where Evan Garr once again went off on the violin. The guys rewarded the audience with yet another superbly reworked cover, when they took on Black Narcissus, originally by Joe Henderson. Lots of playing, little, almost no talking, with Stanley’s occasional addresses, of course, to the audience in the pauses and at the end, when he and the crew launched into Oh Oh, with which he got the crowd on their feet one last time. In its second half, this song flowed into Mothership Connection, where Clarke and Garr stepped right to the front of the stage, and with that the get-together with the legendary master and wizard of bass guitar and double bass came to a close!
At 68, Stanley Clarke and his crew proved once again in Ljubljana that he’s one of a kind, an unrepeatable, elusive original in his craft, and that his shows are a magnificent, spectacular musical experience. Admirable perfection and the incredible, multilayered polish of this great artist, who, immodestly put, with his charisma and his creative as well as live-show zeal, never stops thrilling people. Stanley Clarke wrapped Ljubljana’s Križanke in a fiery trance of thunderous applause, ovations and a daze of great fascination, which of course remains boundless.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
