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About Paul Jackson:

When I was about 18 I had an organ group, and I was playing in a night club in a shopping center. Paul walked in and sat in the audience and smiled at me the whole time, to the point where he was freaking me out. By then I was already into breaking up the 16th note thing. That was the logical extension for jazz musicians who were having to make some money playing R&B. We were getting frustrated with the simple grooves.

So Paul came up and introduced himself on the break and said he really liked what I was doing. He ended up sitting in on the B-3 organ, even though he was normally an acoustic bass player, and he just smoked. It was such an electrifying experience that I went over to his house and we talked all night. And that night began a friendship that lasts until this day. We became a rhythm section, bass and drums, and we played with all the jazz cats in the Bay Area.

Then one afternoon he brought home an electric bass. He used to work at Sherman & Clay's music store in Oakland. We were laughing about it because none of us liked the electric equipment at that time - we were all young, ardent beboppers. Anyway, he took it out of the box and plugged it in, and he played it exactly the way he plays right now.

He said, "Play a funk groove," and I did, and we came up with almost the exact thing you heard on "Actual Proof." We played it straight away, and that's true!

We developed about seven billion of those grooves and we would play with almost every band in the Bay Area. We were one of the hottest rhythm sections around. I was doing what we called four-way drumming or four-way coordination. I did long rhythms where the eighth note continued on the hi-hat no matter what, or a Latin ride or some kind of pattern, with the snare and bass drum in independent coordination. I was also doing what they now call linear drumming, where you play one piece of the set at a time using 16th notes.

I don't know whether I'm the first guy on earth who ever did it, but that was part of my deal. I never heard anybody else do that before. That just came out of my practice room. I didn't even know they were calling it linear until I started teaching about ten years ago. I was doing that in 1968 and '69. I didn’t record my stuff until '73, but I had been playing that way for a while.

It wasn't just the slickness of the patterns. We used to get a tremendous emotional feel, a rhythm feel, underneath it all. And we used to just live for that rush.

About Herbie Hancock:

Around 1973 Herbie Hancock told Lenny White he was considering playing a new kind of music. Lenny told him about Paul and I, and he hired Paul first. Paul and I were sharing an apartment, and Herbie started calling to talk to Paul. Paul was practically never home, so I ended up talking to Herbie all the time. He had heard of me, but he knew of me as a jazz drummer because I had played with Woody Shaw. We'd have these long conversations about music and life and everything. We'd talk for an hour or so at a time. It was totally natural and fun. He'd ask me about what I was doing, and one day he asked me, "Can you play some funk?" At the time I had a steady gig with my own organ trio, The Mike Clark Trio, at The Village in Vallejo, California. I had been there for three years. It was an organ lounge. I said I played funk on the organ gigs if somebody would request it, or if I was working as a sideman with another organist. He said Paul had been speaking very highly of me, and he asked me to come down and play with him and Paul.

So I went to the rehearsal, and at the time I had a Gretsch jazz set - an 18-inch bass drum and K Zildjian cymbals. I started playing in a Tony Williams style and like some things I heard Billy Hart playing on the "Mwandishi" records, thinking, that's the style I wanted to be known for. He stopped after a time and said, "Can you muffle the bass drum?" That shocked me because I always played my drums wide open. So we got a blanket or a pillow and put it up against the front head. Then I remembered the thing Paul and I played when Paul first brought the electric bass home, so I broke that out. When I did, it was so electrifying, and the three of us connected on such a deep level, that it's hard for me to describe. We played the type of rhythm you heard later on "Actual Proof," and we were really excited and happy. When I opened it up and got off the hi-hat and started playing the cymbal, it went into a really high level of jazz communication, but with an eighth note undercurrent. Pretty soon it became very expansive. I had captured both worlds - the things I had heard on the jazz records, Jack DeJohnette and Tony Williams and all the guys I dug - and it seemed to be happening inside the funk. Afterwards we were all laughing and giving each other high fives.

Herbie looked at me and said, "We’re leaving for Chicago Monday, be on the plane." We went on the road for six to eight months and toured the United States with Herbie, Paul, Bennie Maupin [saxophones] and Bill Summers, the percussionist. Harvey Mason had already made the "Head Hunters" record, but from what I gathered, he was doing so well in L. A., he didn’t want to go on the road.

Herbie, Paul and I became a very tight trio. When the rest of the band was added to that, it was incredible. We could play anything, not just funk. I experimented with everything. I played funk with brushes, funk with mallets, funk in seven, funk in five. I purposely used to turn the groove around and play on the "one" and "three" to create that kind of an illusion. We turned it inside out and examined it from every level we could possibly think of.

I remember, wherever we went with Herbie, nobody had heard that style of drumming before and we really turned some heads. They didn't know where the "one" was or how the patterns went.

We were like a family. We spent all our time together, and then when we got home from the road, instead of relaxing with our wives and girlfriends, we'd all call each other on the phone and talk for hours. We couldn't wait to get back on the road again. I've never been in a band like that.

Herbie Hancock, for my money, is the greatest band leader I've ever met in my life. He knew how to get the most out of the musicians. He never discouraged us from experimenting. He didn't want to hear any cliches. He constantly encouraged you to come up with your own ideas. That's why I play the way I do today. I don't play the way other people play, because of that experience. I really ingrained that into my life. He also taught me about polyrhythms. I felt like I was on a high-speed basketball team. We were constantly traveling down court and making fantastic shots - half court shots, hook shots, slam dunking. I couldn't have asked for a better bunch of guys. We're still friends to this day and I still work with all of them. There was a great chemistry.

"Thrust" and "Actual Proof":

When we came back off the road, we went into the studio and recorded the "Thrust" album with the tune "Actual Proof," which became so famous. We had developed the tune night by night through improvising. Herbie would bring in a skeleton arrangement and we'd decorate it the way we saw fit. Sometimes he'd bring in a chart, but mostly he'd just describe it to us.

Even though we had a billion funk grooves in that style, "Actual Proof" was the only one we really got to record. The producer [David Rubinson] had different ideas about what the record should be. At that time I was a young man and I didn't have any experience recording anything but jazz. I didn't really have a studio sound. I just literally took the drums out of the trunk of the car, set them up and played them. The producer immediately started telling me how to play, and pared all my stuff down until I was starting to sound like all the other drummers - a time keeper, without his own identity. After all the work we had done on the road, I had developed my own grooves and my own musical attitudes for each piece we played. For the time, they were very stretched out. This guy was telling me to play the beats I had turned up my nose at in the eighth grade, so right away there was a conflict inside my life. He made it clear that this was what he wanted. He wanted me to play something like you'd hear on the backing track for a vocalist. He was even telling me where on the head to hit the drum. That wasn't how we were playing live but when we got to the studio, that's what happened.

So I played it pretty much the way he asked me to - until we got to "Actual Proof." I said, "Please let me play my style on this tune. I don't want to use any of the latest devices that all the other drummers are using, I want to play my own stuff" - because we really had this tune wired already. When I asked him nicely, he got very angry and demanded that I do it his way. We took a break, and when I asked him again, he said, "Well, you got one take and if you don't make it in that, you're gonna do it my way." So we went in, and what you hear on the record is exactly what happened. We made it in one take and afterwards when we were listening to the playback, everybody was screaming and jumping up and down and laughing and hugging and giving each other five. Herbie said to me, "I'm really glad you fought for that." This was my first lesson in learning how to fight for anything in the studio. I'd never even heard of having to fight about great playing. I assumed everybody was on the same team and we wanted to make great music. I'm sure that the producer wanted to make great music too, but I don't think he understood the music or the drums to the level that I did. It turned out to be total actual proof for my life, and it turned out to be a milestone and an innovation for me.

The University of Hancock:

I asked Herbie every question anyone would ever want to ask about the Miles Davis band with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Wynton Kelly. I talked about it incessantly for two years until I think I drove him nuts. I used to go to his house in L.A. and set the drums up in his garage and we'd play all that music from the Miles period. I'd ask him, "Let’s play 'Sorcerer,' let’s play 'Eye of the Hurricane,' let’s play 'Orbits.'." At that time I knew every one of those tunes. To me this was the best part of the whole experience. Sometimes it was just him and I, or him and I and Paul or maybe another bass player. That was what I was thinking we were going to do in the first place. I didn't realize we were gonna play funk. At first I'd try to play those tunes just like Tony Williams. Then I'd go back and try to play them Elvin Jones style. I tried it from every angle. I graduated from the University of Hancock.

The Headhunters:

For three years, almost every week of my life was spent in an airplane on the road. After that, there was really nowhere left to go with it, so we had to stop. By then people were wanting to do other things, and so was Herbie. I did five albums with him, but the music was becoming more commercial and it was obvious to me that they needed more of a straight-time drummer. I was really getting more and more stretched out. I was trying to make the music more expansive. I was constantly listening to John Coltrane and Miles. While I was in Herbie's band I think I listened to Coltrane and nothing else, every day, almost all day, for one year. Then, after listening to that all day, I'd just go to the gig. So it was obvious that there were going to have to be some changes.

But then as a business move, Herbie offered us the band, the Headhunters, as a separate entity. That's when Bennie Maupin brought the guitarist Blackbyrd McKnight up from L.A. to join the band. Once again, I had to deal with the same producer. At the time, those records that we recorded as the Headhunters were very unsatisfactory to me musically. I felt my life was out of control. I had no interest in playing the type of drums I was being told to play. In those days I wanted to be like Elvin Jones or Tony Williams or Jack De Johnette. However, since there was money around, and being a jazz musician I always needed money, I didn't even question it, I just went to work. Now, I could do a job like that with a great attitude. I can tell in talking with everybody for five minutes what they expect me to do, and whether or not I want to do it. If I take the assignment, then I'll give it my best shot.

Touring with the Headhunters was much different. We really stretched out, sometimes much more than on the Hancock band, and I really liked it. We finally made a fantastic record which was musically and commercially tight, but they never released it.

Brand X:

Around that time Percy Jones, the bass player from Brand X, called me and I went to England to play with my first fusion band. I went to a house in Ascot that Ringo Starr owned and rented out to bands. It was called Startling Studios. They had cooks and maids, the whole nine yards, and you lived there and recorded music. It used to be John and Yoko's house. It's the house from the "Imagine" video. When I saw a model of a 50-foot tyrannosaurus on the lawn just before I got to the front door, I knew I was in the right place. We recorded two albums there that were both very creative. I was allowed total freedom and liberty to do anything I wanted. It wasn't jazz music, but somehow I fit the band artistically and I loved playing with them. We had a really great time and I'm still friends with all of those people. Phil Collins was actually the drummer in the band, but he became so busy with Genesis that they hired me. He played on some of the dates that we did at Ringo's house. The records sold a lot and I toured with that band as well.

Back to San Francisco:

Then Eddie Henderson called me and said, "I have a five-night-a-week gig in San Francisco. Please come home and play it." It was with Dave Liebman, a pianist named Mark Levine and sometimes Pharoah Sanders or Joe Henderson would replace Liebs. It was a steady gig, mostly at a club called Cristo's, in San Francisco. We also played the Lighthouse down in Hermosa Beach in L.A. Some of the other musicians who played were Julien Priester and Hadley Calliman. This band stayed together for a year and a half and I was in heaven. As soon as that band was no longer in existence, I moved straight to New York.

Advice for younger players:

As far as technique is concerned, remember that it's just a musical expression. Each generation comes up with its own thing and then it becomes passé. After you figure out the mystery of it, it just becomes part of the language anyway. The most important thing is to always try to be musical and play with a great feel, good time - I mean, that's the deal.

If you can pioneer something, add something to what's already gone down, that's great, too. And always respect the tradition. Just because you can play a few of the new technical things, don't thumb your nose at the tradition. The new things become part of the tradition anyway.

I'm constantly learning and relearning the language of jazz and blues drumming. Although I know most of the licks, clichés, turnarounds, etc., I find it to be the most interesting study. It's a language you must learn to speak correctly so others will know what you're talking about. Then your musical conversations will be natural.

If you have a natural inclination toward the blues, like I do, it will well up inside your life and pour out of your soul when the groove really hits, especially on blues shuffles or slow blues. Emotionally it's the deepest sensation I've ever found in all my years on the planet. You get a total emotional attack and it takes you over like you're out of control. A really great blues can cripple you. For me, this is the big payoff. This is why most of us are still playing. That feeling is what we live for. It puts tears in your eyes, sends chills up your back, curls up your toes and tickles your funny bone. It makes it all worthwhile.