STANLEY CLARKE

NEA Jazz Master and four-time Grammy Award Winner Stanley Clarke has attained “living legend” status during his over 50-year career as a bass virtuoso. He is the first bassist in history who doubles on acoustic and electric bass with equal ferocity and the first jazz-fusion bassist ever to headline tours, selling out shows worldwide. A veteran of over 40 albums, he won the 2011 Best Contemporary Jazz Album Grammy Award for The Stanley Clarke Band. Clarke co-founded the seminal fusion group Return to Forever with Chick Corea and Lenny White. In 2012 Return to Forever won a Grammy Award and Latin Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Forever.

Clarke’s creativity has been recognized and rewarded in every way imaginable: gold and platinum records, Grammy Awards, Emmy nominations, virtually every readers and critics poll in existence, and more. In 2022 Clarke was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of its four new Jazz Master honorees. He also was Rolling Stone’s very first Jazzman of the Year and bassist winner of Playboy’s Music Award for ten straight years. Clarke was honored with Bass Player Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award and is a member of Guitar Player Magazine’s “Gallery of Greats.” In 2004 he was featured in Los Angeles Magazine as one of the Top 50 Most Influential People. He was honored with the key to the city of Philadelphia and put his hands in cement as a 1999 inductee into Hollywood’s “Rock Walk” on Sunset Boulevard. In 2011 he was honored with the highly prestigious Miles Davis Award at the Montreal Jazz Festival for his entire body of work. Clarke has won Downbeat Magazine’s Reader’s and Critics Poll for Best Electric Bass Player for many years. In September 2016 he became a part of the permanent collection displayed at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC.

Unable to tour most of 2020, Clarke’s Pandemic work has involved developing his web series, Stanley Clarke’s Bass Nation. The series premiered November 2020. The project is about the dynamics of the music industry, recording and performing, and includes Stanley’s conversations with noted musicians, gear reviews, play-throughs and performances.

Born in Philadelphia, Clarke has been a constant force of nature in American music since the early 1970s with the success of the jazz-fusion group Return To Forever. That accomplishment gave way to a number of extremely successful solo albums for Clarke. Along the way, he has collaborated with Quincy Jones, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, The Police, Herbie Hancock and many more, and has shared the stage with Bob Marley and Miles Davis.

Clarke heads his own record label, Roxboro Entertainment Group. Five artists were chosen for its first releases; Lloyd Gregory, Sunnie Paxson, Ruslan Sirota, Kennard Ramsey and piano prodigy Beka Gochiashvili Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. It will soon be releasing singer Natasha Agrama’s CD, The Heart of Infinite Change

Clarke believes in giving back to help young musicians hone their skills. He and his wife Sofia established The Stanley Clarke Foundation seventeen years ago as a charitable organization, which offers scholarships to talented young musicians.