Stanley Clarke
Stanley Clarke

You never stop learning. Just when you think all the notes have been played, all the songs have been written, all the melodies have been sung, and that music has nothing left to surprise you with, something unexpected pops up that will rebuke your pessimism as a know-it-all enthusiast.

Same old store, same old clerk, same old questions. The usual stroll through the rock shelves, but you already have almost everything there is, and what you lack you can easily procure through some acquaintance (a nice monument to whoever invented the CD burner, right?).
You pass by the Jazz shelves hoping something will catch your eye. There are actually quite a few interesting things, but you don't have enough information on many of them and you're afraid of making a bad investment. Twenty euros are always... twenty euros, damn it! You're not in the mood to embark on a journey without a sure destination and abandon this shelf as well.
You see the new edition of Sleeping w/ Ghost by Placebo, a double disc with all the covers as a bonus. But come on, you already have the real album and you don't feel like getting swindled by a damn blatant commercial operation.

You think back to a review from DE-Baser, recalling it mentioned Stanley Clarke. In fact, the review spoke poorly of that album, but in the comments someone reminded you that Clarke's early albums were all good. You remember that concert where he treated the bass as if it were a guitar: chords, sweeps, harmonics, and all the other show-off tricks.
Then you see what should be his first solo album (you'll discover later that it's actually the second...) and decide it's time to dig deeper.
You actually know how he sounds in big bands (for example with Chick Corea) and you even have a solo disc of his from the eighties, that Hideaway you devoured as a kid. "Well sure (with the accent on the i) it only costs 11 euros – you think – it's worth the risk!". And then... you discover that your idea of the world must not be limited by those boundaries found on the atlas and that an otherworldly realm exists. You discover that there are new notes, new songs, new melodies. You discover that the know-it-all belief you had was all bullshit and that you must never – NEVER AGAIN – think that everything has already been played. There will be millions more Stanley Clarke's out there, you just have to find them.

His Jazz-Rock flows over your skin, envelops you, plays at drawing a labyrinth on your goose-bumped skin, has fun vibrating all your hidden places and layers. Magically the atmosphere clears, your room is much larger, the walls barely contain the volume of the speakers. If you had another thousand watts to play, if you had another ten thousand, you'd crank it up to full volume so that everyone can hear what this gentleman who was 23 years old in 1974 is capable of playing...

Modern rock, prog rock, a princely suite of four acts between orthodox jazz and wild shredding, a strange "merge" between Mahavishnu Orchestra missing the guitarist leader and Billy Cobham's "Spectrum", how long did it take you to get around to purchasing this album, you old fool, how much time you wasted before enjoying these 40 minutes of creative madness!
Well, as they say in these cases to mitigate the contempt you feel for yourself, "better late than never"...