Sonny Clark - Fragile Virtuoso

Book summary

Sonny Clark was a jazz pianist whose singular style set him apart from his peers, making him an unforgettable figure in jazz history. This biography delves into his collaborations with iconic musicians, his struggles with addiction, and his close bond with the jazz baroness Nica, capturing the highs and lows of his brief but impactful life.

Excerpt from Sonny Clark - Fragile Virtuoso

One: Herminie Pa: The Beginning: The Boy Wonder

Herminie No 2 is a coal patch a few miles from the bigger company town of Herminie, about sixteen miles east of Pittsburgh. Conrad Yeatis (Sonny) Clark was born on July 21st, 1931. The family moved from Georgia, and Sonny’s father has worked most of his adult life as a miner there. Emory Clark is not a well man, he is suffering from what is known as ‘black lung’ in the family, and he has a permanent cough. Conrad Yeatis Clark is the youngest of eight children born to his mother. The family are surrounded by people from Italy, Poland, Austria, and Russia, as well as their own African American neighbours from Georgia and Tennessee.

The town has a school, churches, including one for black people, a store, a beer garden, and a black-owned hotel, the Redwood Hotel, where they hold popular weekend dances in the region for African Americans. People arrive from miles around for the weekend dances. On August the 2nd, Sonny’s father Emory dies of what is described in the local newspaper as ‘a lingering of tuberculosis’ just ten days after the birth of his youngest son. It is a harsh blow, and from now on Sonny will be raised by his mother, Ruth, taking all and any menial jobs she can get, and his older brothers and sisters. The family move to the Redwood Hotel, belonging to John Redwood, as the house they were living in was owned by the mining company and could only be occupied by a working miner.

His mother started him on piano lessons at just three years old, so he gets just about the earliest start any youngster can receive. He takes to the instrument like a duck to water and needs no encouragement to practice regularly and keep at it.

In 1936, six-year-old Conrad Clark is getting on very well with his piano playing and will commence private instruction in two years’ time. His older brother George is already a pianist and has his own band. Sonny listens to George playing, takes in what he hears, but already seems to have his own ideas about how the instrument should be played. Talking to jazz journalist Nat Hentoff many years later, he will recall, ‘All the instruments were around the house. I fooled around on bass and vibes. I liked to figure out my own way of handling an instrument and was always bugged at studying because I wanted to do what I felt.’ It was something that came early indeed to young, six-year-old Conrad Clark, soon to acquire the nickname Sonny, which he would be known as for the rest of his short life. He is an extremely small boy, lean, and will only grow to just over five feet tall as a fully grown man.

Sonny begins playing piano in the local hotel although he is still in elementary school. He causes quite a stir in the local community with his prowess at the piano at such a young age. His performance receives an enthusiastic write-up in The Pittsburgh Courier, the local newspaper. He wins a talent contest at the hotel and is carried home on the shoulders of his older brother, Emory. Even more exciting for Sonny is when he appears on a radio amateur hour show and plays some lively boogie-woogie. Everyone in the family is impressed even if one or two of his siblings are showing signs of envy. Sonny can sense it but somehow understands, young as he is, that his is a special talent, denied to the majority of the population, found in a very few. His playing on radio is a great success, so much so that the Pittsburgh Courier publishes an article about him.

It is listening to the radio that first alerts Sonny to jazz. He loves the music he hears and, particularly, Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Erroll Garner. Listening to these masters of varying styles of jazz piano, it occurs to him that he will have to keep studying, practice constantly and gain experience so that he can play the piano as well as these men. He listens also to Count Basie and loves the way he swings the orchestra along. Duke Ellington also. When he attends high school, he plays vibes and bass in the school band, but his real thrill is when he is chosen as piano soloist. The piano is his instrument, and he knows how good he is at playing it. At the age of thirteen, he feels he has studied enough and is now ready to take on the world. He has also received an offer to play in a local band that plays for dances.

When he talks about this to his mother, she stops him in his tracks. He needs at least another year of lessons, and he must take in everything he is taught and put it to good use. No giving up now that he is so near to achieving success. His mother tells him that he has a special talent for music, far in advance of any ability that his brothers or sisters have. Of course, she would never say that to any of them and he must never mention it, but there it is. And when you have such a special talent you must do everything in your power to nurture and control and make the best of it. He knows that already, of course he does so, there must be no more idle talk about giving up lessons.

Sonny knows the wisdom of his mother’s words and carries on with lessons. For more than ten years he has practised regularly and has received lessons, first by his pianist brother George and then a qualified teacher. Even as he gets gigs to play in local dance bands, he keeps rigorously to his practice routines. All is going well above the surface, but underneath there is pain and trauma. As a young teenager, he is barely aware of the tragedies in his life, but they are there.

Struggle and tragedy have stalked the Clark family from the beginning. His parents Emory and Ruth grew up in the countryside of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Their first move was to Aliquippa where his father secured work in the coke yards of a steel company. Driven out of Aliquippa by frightening KKK activity, they settled in Herminie, another rural location, to raise their family and find security. But Emory’s early death from a mining-related disease meant another move, this time to John Redwood’s hotel. Sonny enjoyed playing piano there from an early age, but further trauma is to follow when his mother dies of breast cancer, and a short time later, the Redwood Hotel burns to the ground. The family move out to Pittsburgh.

Attending high school in Jeanette, Sonny is featured playing bass, vibes, guitar, and piano in the school band. Evenings and weekends find him playing in local Pittsburgh bands and earning a little money for himself and his family. At the age of fifteen, Sonny appears on the programme of the historic Night of the Stars concert held at the Syria Mosque to celebrate the music of Pittsburgh’s jazz superstars. The show is presented by the Frog Club and The Pittsburgh Courier. Sonny is in important jazz company here, alongside Pittsburgh-born pianists, Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams and Billy Strayhorn. He also shares the bill with jazz greats such as Billy Eckstine, Roy Eldridge, Maxine Sullivan and Ray Brown. It is a big moment for him, the culmination of a series of successful performances in public that began with his recital on piano at just six years old.

Could he make it as a professional jazz pianist? Sonny is just beginning to believe that perhaps he can, even if he is just a poor black boy from the rural backwoods of Herminie No 2. And if he can make it at all, the chances are slim indeed, here in Pittsburgh. Ideally, he would like to go to New York because that is the centre of most of the jazz activity in America. Always has been. But he knows from musicians he has spoken to in recent times that competition is fierce for every gig, every record date. According to one musician he spoke to, for every record date in NYC, there are ten to fifteen musicians on every instrument clamouring to get on it.

New York is where he wants to be. That is where they play the sort of modern bop-fuelled jazz he wants to play. He intends to get there though, one day. Not just yet perhaps, not until he has gained more professional experience and has a list of known musicians he can say he has worked with. Also, although he hates to admit it, the size of NYC and the great number of jazz musicians struggling to make it there frightens him a little. The knowledge of this he has gained by talking to his brother George who is also a pianist, and he may have the answer to Sonny’s dilemma. George is planning to visit their aunt in California but, if opportunity should be presented, he would like to live and work in California. He asks Sonny to go with him.

Sonny considers it and thinks it might be an extremely good idea. There is, he has heard, a lot of jazz in L.A., so it would be ideal to try and get a few gigs there for experience. Unlike George, though, he has no intention of staying long. A month, two, three at the outside? Then back home to see the family and reconsider his future options. After much thought and due deliberation, he agrees to go, so George and Sonny set off for Sunny California.

The Pittsburgh Courier

Sam Stephenson. The Paris Review