Photo: Neil Clarke | © Joyce Jones/ Suga Bowl Photography. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-ND. Used with Permission.
The next show will air on Sunday, June 24, 2018 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This broadcast presents an interview with master percussionist Chief Baba Neil Clarke.
We will also speak with Dr. Segun Shabaka, Board Chair of the 2018 International African Arts Festival, where Clarke is one of the headline performers. Chief Baba Neil will perform a tribute to Mongo Santamaria.
Chief Baba Neil Clarke is a master percussionist of legendary status. Born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvestant in the spring of 1951, Clarke is internationally acclaimed as a percussionist who has been involved with traditional African drumming and the percussive arts for more than half a century. He performs regularly with and has had long term musical relationships with artists such as: Randy Weston, Harry Belafonte, Dianne Reeves, Miriam Makeba and many others.
Clarke has made it his mission to continue the pioneering work of his mentors and trainers. In honor of that collective of elders who played a pivotal role in bringing African cultural traditions to North America, South America, and the Caribbean in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Neil Clarke has helped keep those traditions alive.
In addition to his activities as a professional performer, Chief Baba Neil (as he is now affectionately called), has been active in arts in education programming for more than four decades as an educator and a consultant. He has conducted artist residencies and designed programming at all educational levels from elementary and middle school through secondary and college. Chief Baba Neil has done artist residencies and master classes at institutions such as Harvard University, Duke University, Rutgers University, Long Island University (C.W. Post), University of Hartford, Lewis and Clark College, and many others. And over the years he has served as a presenter and consultant for many of the major cultural institutions in the New York area including: The Caribbean Cultural Center, the Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, to name a few.
Chief Baba Neil has also been engaged as both a panel presenter and moderator on subjects related to the exploration of the history and historical presence of the African drum in America. He has been cited in several publications on the subject. In 2012, he was awarded a grant by the Center for Black Music Research and a Research Fellowship for Archival Research by the Black Metropolis Research Consortium to further his studies.
Currently, as an adjunct professor in the music department at the City University of New York (since 2004), Clarke conducts a popular course of his own design on Traditional African Percussion Ensemble performance and theory.
(Bio adapted from Chief Baba Neil’s Facebook page. More info is available at his website.
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
Chief Baba Neil will perform a tribute to Mongo Santamaria at the 2018 International African Arts Festival in Brooklyn on Sunday July 1.
Web Extras:
Watch Clarke’s band perform at Brooklyn’s Sista’s Place in this live clip.
Watch Clarke perform with Randy Weston’s African Rhythms in this live clip.
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman College in the City University of New York system.
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