ANAHEIM, Calif. — Jazz bassist Stanley Clarke sits at the center of the room, six young musicians focused on him as they practice at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center on a recent afternoon.

"So the bassline I'm playing feels best at this tempo," Clarke says, his fingers plucking out a melody on the thick strings of his double bass.

"Love that, love that," says pianist Samuel Smylie, whose composition "Debra's Disposition" is the piece the jazz combo is rehearsing.

"It's a groove," Clarke says. "It's lazy, but not too lazy. It's just sitting at home."

At 73, Clarke is a jazz legend; he was a prodigy in his teens when he started playing and recording with icons such as Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey. With pianist Chick Corea, he co-founded the jazz fusion group Return To Forever. A prolific recording artist as bandleader and group member, his musical interests refused to be pigeonholed as jazz alone as other sounds — R&B, rock, classical — flowed in and out of his work over decades.

In September 2023, the BroadStage in Santa Monica named Clarke its artist-in-residence for a three-year term, a role that will have him speaking and performing at the contemporary art venue as well as mentoring students from Santa Monica College and Santa Monica High School. Clarke is also helping develop a pair of jazz festivals there, a smaller one this year and a larger, international one for 2026.

The rehearsal with current students and recent graduates of the Santa Monica College applied music program took place a week or so before the first of those festivals. The Future Sounds of Jazz Festival on Saturday, Sept. 21 will feature Clarke with jazz combos from both the college and the high school, as well as established and rising jazz musicians such as Judith Hill, Gretchen Parlato with Gerald Clayton, Alan Hampton, Clarence Penn, and more.

After a short break, current SMC student Aidan Farrell took the lead as the combo rehearsed jazz pianist Kenny Barron's "Voyage," a song perhaps best known in Barron's recording with saxophonist Stan Getz.

"I'm biased because I'm a saxophone player, but I'd like it very fast," Farrell tells Clarke.

"Show me," he instructs.

The two of them, and eventually Smylie, guitarist Varad Sahasrabudhe, trumpet player Aoi Kuroha, and drummer Niko Karassik, work to get the tempo and structure of the song right, struggling a little until things almost click into place.

"What would you suggest?" Farrell asks Clarke at one point.

"No, this is not my band," Clarke replies with a slight smile and a shake of his head. "It's your band. I'm just the bass player."

A day later, in an interview edited for length and clarity, Clarke talked about the BroadStage residency, his own early days as a jazz musician, his restless interest in playing music of any genre anywhere, and more.

Q: Yesterday, you said, 'I'm just the bass player,' but I imagine the first time these young musicians came to play with you they were like, 'Oh my God, it's Stanley Clarke!'

A: It's true, it's true. I mean, I was the same way when I was 18 and I was kind of thrown out there. I was playing with Stan Getz and people like that, serious jazz musicians. You know, at some point the guys have to own what they're doing. They're not just like a little leaf hanging onto some bigger entity like a tree, and just blowing around, whatever happens happens.

Because it is really their group. I'm helping their group. In music, someone has to step up and go, 'OK, let's do it this way. Maybe let's try this. Let's try that.' Some people have more of those qualities than others.

Q: What do you try to teach young musicians like those in your residency when you work with them?

A: These guys are really pretty much ready to hit the streets, as they say. So some of these guys, what they need is to be polished. Or polish themselves actually, to be honest.

We were talking earlier about confidence. I mean, there's a certain degree of nervousness we have just as human beings, but when you're a musician, at some point you have to take it really seriously.

Q: You were even younger than these musicians when you started playing with big names in jazz. What was that like?

A: I had a burning desire to be a jazz musician; that's something I really wanted to do. I was going to a school; at the time, it was called the Philadelphia Musical Academy, and during the summers I would go up to New York and play and be with those guys. My plan was to join the Philadelphia Orchestra. I forget what people like me were called back then — negroes or colored or whatever — but I wanted to be one of the first of those (in the orchestra).

So I practiced really, really, really hard. I got a gig to play in a band and Chick Corea was the piano player. Chick says to me, 'So what are you doing?' I say, 'Well, I go to school, too.' I think he had this whole thing planned out. He came by my school and talks me into leaving school.

He says, 'Man, we can write music, you know.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'I can tell you compose. And you know, there's Bach and Beethoven, there's Corea and Clarke.' [He laughs] I said, 'Well, that sounds interesting to me. Shortly after that, I actually moved to New York. I got a lot of work, and I attribute that to my studies. I could read pretty much anything. But at the same time, I still had those fears and the feelings of, 'Am I really good enough?'

Q: Were the older jazz musicians in New York City ever skeptical of the new kid in town or give you a hard time?

A: Well, I did a record with Dexter Gordon that I still don't listen to. I think I might have heard it once. Just because I was so scared. In those days, the guys were very brash. So I remember, I'm in Rudy Van Gelder's studio, and I'm sitting there facing the door and it was very sunny outside. At one point I see this guy standing there with this long coat on, with a saxophone case and something else in the other hand. And it was Dexter.

I'm a young kid. Dexter Gordon is like, you know? So I almost had an out-of-body experience there. I didn't know what the hell was going to happen next. And what does Dexter say? First thing he says, 'Where's the youngblood?' [He laughs] Where's the youngblood?' And he just points. Everyone looked at me.

But those guys were really nice to me. They really didn't have to be. I was hired to play the bass. And I believe I was making mistakes. There was this great piano player, Elvin Jones' brother, named Hank Jones that played on it. Hank said, 'Come on over here, stand next to me.' Because they were doing tunes without charts that I didn't even know. He says, 'Stand here, look at my left hand.' He'd play. That was a great experience. I mean, talking about scared, man.

Q: I've been doing a deep dive into your music online, and one thing that strikes me is how varied your interests are — jazz, fusion, R&B, rock, film scores, a trio with violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and banjo player Béla Fleck. It feels like unusually wide interests for a musician.

A: That's a fair assessment, how you're looking at this. I think that because I spent so much time studying the bass I never really considered myself a jazz bassist, you know? I never really considered myself part of any genre. I just considered myself a bass player, and if somebody called me for a gig, I was there.

I became a musician that got into the study of languages. I learned at a young age that every one of those genres, they have a language. Like jazz is a language, but country music, there's a language there. There's older swing music, Dixieland stuff. Obviously, classical music. And that helped me when I came to New York because I did a lot of sessions.

I remember one day I did a session in the morning for Jimmy Dean sausages; it was country music. Later that day, I did a session with, I think it was either Aretha Franklin or Donnie Hathaway, for Atlantic. And then later that night, I went to Rudy Van Gelder's studio and recorded with Pharoah Sanders, avant-garde music. I think I might even have put on a dashiki at that point because everybody had them.

So I was that guy; I could play anything. I still am like that. I love it. I mean, yeah, I love that they call me Stanley Clarke, the jazz bass player. It's great. But in my heart, I am a bass player.

Q: How did you end up making Los Angeles your home at a time when New York City had long been the heart of the jazz world?

A: I was so lucky that I caught, in my opinion, the last days of the sort of romantic jazz universe there. I mean, Miles Davis was there. Monk was there. Wayne Shorter was there. Everybody was there and it was a great time. And then I noticed lots of people were moving to different places.

I remember Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock had moved to California. At the Village Vanguard, which was a little club in New York, Herbie had come back and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He was looking real shiny, and he was happy, healthy. He just seemed brighter to me, like a glow. So me and Chick Corea, when we started making some money, we thought, 'Let's move to California. You know, it looks good out there, man.'

We bought houses out there, and I moved out (around 1975), and half of me liked it and half of me didn't. The part that I liked, I loved the beauty, the aesthetics of living. I lived in a great neighborhood, trees, you could feel the oxygen. And yes, there was fresh orange juice. But New York had this speed, this high velocity. Los Angeles, just to have a jam session, you have to get four guys on the phone. They have to get up, drive what I considered a long distance, just to play.

Q: You have a new album coming out this fall?

A: Yeah, there's a new package. It's two CDs and two matching pieces of vinyl, and a picture book that goes back to all those times that if somebody wanted to know who this guy Stanley Clarke is, they could get this thing. It's a lot of music, 14 songs. And it's really, really good. It's called 'Last Train to Sanity.'

Q: You're now 73, but jazz musicians don't really retire, do they?

A: We don't retire. We bop 'til we drop. That sounds a little morbid. But I have met guys — conductors, especially. There's one in particular — I'm not going to mention his name — he's doing some film score or something and [he makes a heart attack sound and gesture] he almost fell into the first violins.

I don't want to go out like that. I'm just going to keep going. I'm pretty in tune with this body here, so there may come a point [he acts out stiff arthritic fingers on the bass strings] it gets down. Then I'll stop.

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