User:AOO2016/sandbox/Neil Clarke

Neil Clarke (also known as Baba Neil and Chief Baba Neil) is an African percussionist born May 29, 1951, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He is highly regarded as a percussionist who plays a variety of musical genres, including traditional African, folkloric, jazz, popular, rhythm and blues, gospel or classical.

In his early years, he studied with “Chief” James Hawthorne Bey, Baba Kwame Ishangi, and Olukose Wiles. Over the course of fifty years, he has performed or recorded with jazz, R&B, and world music artists such as Harry Belafonte, Onaje Allen Gumbs, Dianne Reeves, David Sanborn, Miriam Makeba, Letta Mbulu, Carlos Garnet, Paul Winter, the Spirit Ensemble, Tulivu Donna Cumberbatch, Noel Pointer, Arthur Prysock, Phyllis Hyman, Third World, Norman Connors, The Main Ingredient, and many others. Before the death of NEA Jazz Master Randy Weston, Clarke served as Weston's percussionist as a member of his African Rhythms group since 1991. Clarke was also the resident percussionist for Harry Belafonte for nearly 15 years. Clarke's first studio recording with Belafonte as a percussionist was in 1988 on Paradise in Gazankulu on EMI Records.

= Scholarly Work on African Culture = Besides being touring internationally as a African percussionist, Clarke has been a patron and researcher of African art and culture for more than 40 years. His focus has been on the global significance of the drum, on the African drum in America, on the percussive arts, and on traditional African culture in general. In 2011 and 2015, the Center for Black Music Research and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium awarded Clarke a travel grant and research fellowships to further his studies on the historical significance of the African drum. In 2017, Clarke was invited to contribute to African Arts (Vol. 50; #3), a publication founded in 1967 that "presents original research and critical discourse on traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures." The publication features Clarke's tribute to scholar Robert Farris Thompson.

= Disography =