School Days (1976)

Rock critic Robert Christgau puts Stanley Clarke in the Meltdown list of his 1970s Consumer Guide (with England Dan and John Ford Coley, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, Klaatu, Chuck Mangione, Jean-Luc Ponty, and many others you wouldn’t want to meet in a music discussion group). I can see the point, listening to School Days again lately, but the album has certain sentimental attachments for me and vivid mood memories of the mid-‘70s. It was given to me as a gift by a friend who also happened in his own right to be a highly active bass player, playing in a free jazz ensemble and jamming around. Clarke was a kind of peer, or maybe role model just five years ahead of him, a founding member of Return to Forever and long-time sideman to Chick Corea. School Days is Clarke’s fourth solo album and it raised his commercial profile to new heights, reaching #34 on the Billboard 200 album chart (#2 on Jazz Albums). At one time—say, shortly after the gift exchange—high points like the riff on the title song starting around 1:41 sounded positively heroic to me. I played it loud and I played it often. But after that first one (of six tracks total) the songs drift toward the inane, with various exercises attempting to evoke moods and such: “Quiet Afternoon,” “Desert Song,” “Hot Fun,” so on so forth. There’s a strong sense of dynamics here and an ability to take it down low. The horns are a nice touch, the vocals not so much. There’s too much focus on the bass, but, well. And I loved the overall antiseptic cleanliness of the sound, perhaps the primary appeal to me of fusion. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It was never so much the playing fast that did it for me as it was the doing so cleanly. These were virtues for me in 1976. See Al DiMeola (also on the Meltdown list) or Chick Corea, to come full circle and return to forever. Yet inevitably, in my experience, the antiseptic leads too surely to the sterile. Next stop punk-rock.