# The jazz-hip Sonny Clark album: a trio session didn’t see the light of day until its release in Japan more – Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/09/19/the-jazz-hip-sonny-clark-album-a-trio-session-didnt-see-the-light-of-day-until-its-release-in-japan-more-videos-photos/
- Published: 2024-09-19T00:07:55+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The hip Sonny Clark album, as everyone knows, is Cool Struttin’, a quintet date
from 1958 which has come to epitomise what we think of as the Blue Note style: relaxed
but compact hard bop, rooted in a deep swing and with the blues never far away. **

Clark died of a heroin overdose in 1963, aged 31, with nothing to his name beyond
his appearances on some exceptional recordings. He would no doubt be astonished 
to learn that his most celebrated album would sell over 200,000 copies between 1991
and 2009 — almost 180,000 of those copies in Japan, where Cool Struttin’ mysteriously
became one of the biggest jazz albums of all time.

My favourite Clark album is something different: a trio session that didn’t see 
the light of day until its release in Japan more than three decades after the pianist’s
death. Blues in the Night is a comparatively modest effort: only 26 minutes long,
or 33 minutes if you count the alternate take of the title track. Presumably that’s
why it wasn’t released at the time: simply not enough music to make a full 12-inch
LP.

Clark was a fine composer, but Blues in the Night is all standards: “Can’t We Be
Friends”, “I Cover the Waterfront”, “Somebody Loves Me”, “Dancing in the Dark”, “
All of You”. It’s a supper-club set, with nothing to upset the horses. But it’s 
also, in its quiet and unassuming way, pure treasure. With the great Paul Chambers
on bass and Wes Landers — otherwise unknown to me — on drums, Clark makes his way
through these tunes at a variety of comfortable tempos with a wonderful touch perfectly
highlighted by the simplicity of the setting.

![Sonny Clark Steps Out of the Shadows, on a Revelatory New Reissue From 1960  |
WBGO](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3955683/2147483647/strip/true/
crop/2019x1348+0+0/resize/880x588!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.
amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fsites%2Fwbgo%2Ffiles%2F201710%2Fsonny_clark_crop.jpg)

I can listen to it all the way through just concentrating on how he articulates 
a triad: putting down his fingers in a way that makes the chord far more than three
notes being played at the same time, the minute unsynchronisations that make it 
human. And what he finds, I suppose, is a sweet spot between Bud Powell’s probing,
restless single-note lines and the swinging, transparently joyful lyricism of Wynton
Kelly. Which is a place I’m very happy to be.

I’m indebted for the Cool Struttin’ sales figure to an extraordinary chapter devoted
to Clark in a book by Sam Stephenson called Gene Smith’s Sink, a kind of discursive
biographical appendix to The Jazz Loft, an earlier book in which Stephenson gave
a detailed history of the rackety loft apartment on New York City’s Sixth Avenue,
in what used to be called the Flower District, where the great photographer W. Eugene
Smith kept a kind of open house for beatniks and other outsiders, recording all 
their comings and goings on camera film and reel-to-reel tape. From 1957 to 1965
Smith’s loft was the location of an endless jam session featuring the likes of Thelonious
Monk and Zoot Sims. Sara Fishko’s 2015 documentary film, The Jazz Loft According
to W. Eugene Smith, is based on the book and is highly recommended.

Clark was a regular at the loft, and in Gene’s Sink the author recounts how Smith’s
obsession with recording everything around him — even TV and radio news bulletins—
extended to the sound of the pianist barely surviving another overdose. Stephenson
himself fell in love with Clark’s playing when hearing another posthumous Blue Note
release, Grant Green’s The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark. He writes about him
with enormous sensitivity, piecing together the story of a life that began as the
youngest of a family of children in a Pennsylvania town called Herminie No 2, named
after the mineshaft that gave the place its reason for existence.

If you’re interested in Sonny Clark’s progress from Pennsylvania coal country via
Southern California to the New York jazz scene of the late 1950s, Stephenson’s beautiful
piece of writing is the thing to read. And it was while following in Gene Smith’s
footsteps to Japan (where the photographer documented the horrendous effects of 
mercury poisoning on the people of the fishing village of Minamata in the 1970s)
that the author came across the ideograms most commonly used by Japanese jazz critics
in discussions of Clark’s playing: they can be translated as “sad and melancholy”,“
sympathetic and touching”, “suppressed feelings”, and one which combines the symbols
for “grieving”, “autumn” and “the heart” to suggest “a mysterious atmosphere of 
pathos and sorrow”.

That mood isn’t really reflected in my favourite Sonny Clark record. What I hear,
funnily enough, is an expression of pleasure in being alive to play the music he
loved and for which he had such a precocious talent. I’m guessing he sometimes felt
like that, too.

Sam Stephenson’s Gene’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View was published by Farrar, Straus 
and Giroux in 2017. The Jazz Loft Project was published by Knopf Doubleday in 2012.

The portrait of Sonny Clark is from Blue Note Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff,
by Michael Cuscuna, Charlie Lourie and Oscar Schnider, published by Universe in 
2000 (photo © Mosaic Images).

Clark’s Blues in the Night was first released in Japan in 1979 and issued on CD 
in 1996. The tracks are also available on Clark’s Standards CD, released in 1998.

![Sonny Clark F Wolff](https://i0.wp.com/thebluemoment.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/
08/sonny-clark-f-wolff.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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