Fine tuned

Kevin Clark has a hearing problem: a preternaturally acute sensitivity to pitch. An out-of-tune piano is not to be borne. So he has taken to carrying his own remedy, a mahogany-handled piano tuner’s spanner, which he now pulls from his briefcase with a flourish, his eyes glinting behind thick bifocals.

Though the days of honky tonk pianos in halls are over, it is there in case of need.

It is mid November, the start of the Christmas season, a frenetic time for a jobbing jazz musician and band leader.

Clark’s most recent gig was a corporate Latin-Mexican evening; his next, in a couple of days, is to be a music-of-the-twenties event “Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine played very tinkly, that sort of thing.”

I wonder how many among his convivial yuletide audiences will realise that their piano player has a Tui Award-winning pedigree, that he was formerly a distinguished and prosperous Wellington architect, or that once the Christmas period is over he will head south to the Mackenzie country to spend his leisure time flying gliders.

The 66-year-old has notched up an extraordinary c.v., one that in many ways seems to embody the virtues of jazz: discipline, improvisation and a sense of play.

Plimmerton-based Clark, architect, composer, musician and glider pilot, was born and raised in a small town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

As a child he fell asleep to the lilt of lullabies sung to him in Xhosa by his Bantu nanny, and he remembers the call-and-response work songs of the black work gangs digging the trenches for a sewage reticulation scheme on his street – an event that drew tape-recorder carrying ethnomusicologists from Rhodes University.

Clark’s own musical career began with the ukulele. At seven his rendition of Home on the Range won him the under-10 section of a talent quest. And at age 15 he had progressed to playing the trumpet at church concerts and in the school marching band.

Jazz, however, was no part of his upbringing and when, as a university student studying architecture, he ended up with a jazz musician as a flatmate he needled him mercilessly: “I said, ‘There’s no tune. You can’t whistle it.’”

Famous last words. Soon Clark – by now having heard jazz live and seen several jazz shows during a trip to the States – was hooked, playing in jazz bands himself, learning from and mixing with the likes of jazz musician/composers Hugh Masekela and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim).

Clark then headed to London where he practised architecture and played in rhythm-and-blues bands and pubs on the side. In 1962 he and a fellow architect rode a Matchless motorbike from Europe, across Asia Minor and into the Middle East, stopping along the way to research the works of the 16th century Ottoman empire architect Sinan and passing through the middle of an Arab-Kurdish war in Iraq.

London was also where he met and married Barbara, a Kiwi from Wanganui.

In 1967 the couple moved to Wellington. It came as a shock. Capetown, even if blighted by the iniquities of apartheid (Clark’s friend Hugh Masekela, for one, was forced into exile in 1961) had been vibrant and multicultural. London had been grimy, but again a wellspring of culture. Mid-sixties Wellington felt like dropping off the edge of the world.

His first impressions of New Zealand as an architect? “Where ever man had been he had made a mess of it: old corrugated iron, wrecked buildings, ugly towns and cities with poles and wires everywhere. But the landscape was fantastic.”

Nonetheless, he and his wife settled in. They started a family, and within three or four years Clark had his own architectural practice. “Eventually we became Kiwi-fied.” And he began playing gigs, his first being at the Las Vegas Cabaret in Miramar.

Through the late sixties and seventies, Clark played in dance bands for a succession of weddings, parties and rugby club socials, in the process discovering New Zealanders’ peculiar love affair with alcohol. Looking to find a more sophisticated – and less inebriated – audience, he formed The Kevin Clark Group (aka, for obscure reasons, Gruntphuttock’s Revenge). Soon the group was featuring in jazz festivals, radio programmes and – in something of a coup – as a fixture in Brian Edwards’ new weekly television show, Edwards on Saturday. “Very, very scary,” Clark terms the experience of being broadcast live to air.

How influential was Edwards? You could call it compulsory viewing; with much of New Zealand receiving only the one channel, for many viewers it was Edwards or nothing.

Overnight, Clark and vocalist Fran Barton became national celebrities, launching an era in which Clark would appear on numerous television shows, ranging from pop to jazz, often alongside overseas artists and the New Zealand Jazz Orchestra.

And while Clark of the Kevin Clark Group was becoming familiar to middle New Zealand, Clark’s other band, the 40 Watt Banana, was building another audience with a repertoire of experimental music, blending jazz with traditional Indian musical forms utilising ragas and Indian instruments, such as the tabla and sitar. They recorded with the renowned mridungum (double-ended drum) player Dr Balu Balachandram.

One pop track, Nirvana, made it into the New Zealand top twenty and the group became a darling of the student circuit, with the early Split Enz playing, on one occasion, as the supporting act - “an event one of my sons dined out on for years,” says Clark. Concurrently, Clark the architect worked on a gamut of projects: sports stadia (the Renouf Tennis Stadium is one of his); commercial residential and industrial buildings; churches; electrical substations, water and sewage treatment plants. Commissions took him overseas to work on urban design in Brunei and Malaysia.

But by the late nineties it had all begun to pall. The Resource Management Act was becoming, as Clark terms it, a drag. He and Barbara had a house on the beachfront in Plimmerton; the children had left home. “I would get up in the mornings and say, ‘Why am I doing this? Another day hassling with bureaucracy? I really don’t need this any more.’ I think I had just run my course.”

At age 57, Clark threw it in, selling his practice, to become a student, musician, composer, ethnomusicological explorer, and, more recently, a part-time jazz tutor.

Now would be the time to explore some of the musicological questions that had long intrigued him. When he set out to complete his bachelor’s degree in jazz at what is now the New Zealand School of Music (he would later complete an honours degree, again with an emphasis on ethnomusicology and jazz), he had his thesis topic already in mind. “I was interested in the differences between Cuban music and music in the southern states of America, when both had drawn African slaves from the same source.”

The allure was more than intellectual; for a proper investigation, he and Barbara would need to make an odyssey to Cuba, a place the two inveterate travellers had long wanted to visit.

Cuba, Clark remembers, was falling to bits, but the people were “fantastic, absolutely marvellous” and the experience of playing and learning with Cuban musicians was a revelation.

“They were so relaxed and easy. I would be trying to play something on the piano and the guy would push me aside saying ‘muy mecánico’ – too mechanical. But then when I tried to teach him some jazz, I would say ‘muy mecánico!’”

And what of the musicological question he was trying to answer?

He attributes the differences that emerged between the evolution of the musical traditions of the slaves brought into Cuba and America’s South to differences in the social and religious environment. Protestant America vigorously tried to deAfricanise the slaves, whereas the Roman Catholic church in Cuba was somehow more laissez faire. “That, or they were conned,” says Clark. Either way, many African traditions that failed to survive in North America would persist in Cuba. (For example, even as their forms evolved, African deities would live on in Cuba rebadged as Catholic saints).

Another musical conundrum that had puzzled him for years – the origin of a Latin American-type rhythm called the ghouma or sakie sakie used in the music of the Cape Malays and Boers – resolved itself recently when he attended a lecture about the folk music of Indonesia.

“I heard that rhythm again, and it dawned on me. In the Middle East and the Arab traders and Muslim missionaries had taken their music and religion to the Spice Islands - now known as Indonesia. This rhythm became embedded in the folk music. The Dutch later colonised these islands [The Dutch East Indies] and when they in turn settled the Cape they brought their Malay and Indonesian slaves to Cape Town. I then started hunting round and I found some interviews with old Cape Malay musicians and there it was. Their ancestors had brought the rhythm of their music to Capetown from Java and Sumatra. The Arabs also took that rhythm to Spain, and as a result that rhythm is an essential ingredient of Latin American music. Fascinating stuff.”

How did it feel at 50-something to be studying alongside students as young as his sons? Age didn’t come into it, he says. In jazz circles all that matter are talent and skill. “I was asked by other chronologically-challenged people, ‘How did you get on? How did you feel?’

‘About what?’

‘Being old?’

I said I didn’t notice. It didn’t occur to me.”

Clark is no jazz purist. Rap and hip hop get short shrift, but otherwise he is man of few prejudices.

Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music were staples when Clark and his group played regular gigs at Paremata’s Sandbar Pub (no longer, alas, a jazz venue), but there was always a certain unpredictability. “Sometimes we’d play jazz interpretations of pop songs or Duke Ellington or bizarre renditions of corny old tunes that you’d never expect in a jazz setting.” How eclectic is he? “I have a two piece band, called The Two Man Band that does idiotic things with tuba, piano, trumpet, trombone, double bass, swanee whistle and vocals. We sometimes do reharmonised versions of Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water and other rock anthems. It’s all deliberately absurd, but audiences love it.”

Light jazz, boogie woogie, classic hits, Dixie. old-time... as Christmas draws nigh Clark will play a repertoire to suit his audience’s tastes, appearing either solo, in a jazz trio or quartet, or as part of a larger band. Vocalist Fran Barton often joins him, extending the musical possibilities still further. One of his bands, Los Gringos, specialises in Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz. Another, the Dixie Dudes, plays traditional Dixieland, music that is, according to Clark’s website, “Fun, Frolicky and Festive”.

This is the lot of the jazz musician in New Zealand. Pure jazz has a small following; to make a living, you must be prepared to turn your hand to anything. Not that Clark seems to mind.

“As long as the music is good and played well you can always have fun.”

Building a new home: At press, Wellington MPs had set aside political differences to lobby the Government to give the New Zealand School of Music a new home in Wellington’s Civic Square, at a cost of up to $50 million. MPs Chris Finlayson (National), Marian Hobbs (Labour), and Heather Roy (ACT) are working with the Wellington City Council to lobby the Government. The New Zealand School of Music is a joint venture between Victoria and Massey universities.

Clark’s latest album, Zahara, shares its name with the small, sleepy, Spanish hilltop town in the mountains outside of Cadiz where Clark and his wife Barbara sojourned while he pursued an interest in flamenco.

Clark’s interest in flamenco, and particularly jazz flamenco, was first awakened by two films: Latcho Drom, about the Roma, the travelling people better known as Gypsies, and Calle 54, a documentary about Latin-jazz, which crucially featured a segment by flamenco jazz musician Chano Domínguez. He began ordering in CDs from Spain. “Eventually I thought I really have to go to Spain and see what I can find.”

From the town of Zahara, Clark made excursions to gypsy bars in the major cities (some very seedy), to CD stores, and to flamenco dance classes. “Not to learn to dance, but to understand the connection to the music.” Sometimes the music would come to Clark, as when in a bar or restaurant people would spontaneously take up instruments, sing, clap and dance.

Is Zahara then a flamenco album? Clark would not call it that, even though a number of the tracks employ flamenco forms, such as the solea and buleria, and feature palmeras (flamenco hand clappers) and the cajón (flamenco box drum). Better to say, as do the liner notes, that these original Clark compositions exhibit “a healthy dose of the Spanish tinge”. Jazz with a flamenco flavour.

To play flamenco, explains Clark, you must grow up immersed within the traditions and rhythms of flamenco, some of which, using the additive rhythms of Middle East rather than the West’s divisive rhythms, are alien to the Western ear. “The closest we get to a flamenco jazz feel is a solea track, which is of those nasty 12-beat cycle things with the harmonic rhythm in a strange place. We have barely scratched the surface.”

Zahara follows 2002’s Once Upon a Song I Flew and 2004’s album of live performances, The Sandbar Sessions, both of which won Best Jazz Album in the New Zealand Music Awards.

Wellington’s DominionPost reviewer has described Zahara as Clark’s best work yet. Zahara is available from all good CD stores or directly from clark@xtra.co.nz .