Eight-year-old Colleen Clark, like many 8-year-old girls in elementary schools around the United States, was assigned to play the flute in her school orchestra. To Colleen, however, that wasn’t going to cut it.
“But Dad, I need to play the drums,” she remembers pleading with her father. Around this time, she had worn out her parents’ Buddy Rich cassette tapes, as well as memorized Gene Krupa’s drum solo in “Sing Sing Sing.”
Her band teacher, however, was not having it. He had 15 drummers, she remembers him saying, why should she be allowed to switch her instrument? Colleen’s father negotiated that she would receive private lessons in addition to the band practice if the leader would allow Colleen to play the drums. He caved, and out of his 15 drummers, Colleen was the only one to make it through the entire year.
“I was always just driven by the sound of drums and attracted to it, “ Colleen says with a smile as she retells the story. “So I just always knew there was something inside of me that needed to be released, and I knew it was going to happen on the drums.”
Growing up, Colleen said she had three goals: to become a New Yorker, a successful drummer, and to stay an avid Yankees’ fan. Now, Colleen is 23 and finishing her master’s in jazz studies at Purchase, while writing and performing her own music as a bandleader. She lives in southern Westchester, but has gigs throughout the week in Brooklyn and the Village. Oh, and she still dons a Yankee cap from time to time when she catches up on her favorite players: Jorge Pasada and Derek Jeter.
On Sept. 16, Colleen debuted her own music and lyrics at Caffe Vivaldi in Greenwich Village with her “musical baby:” The Colleen Clark Band. The bar is dimly lit, with burnt orange walls and old wooden chairs that cramp the band into the café. There is something old-world about the venue, but with a dash of a vampy jazz ambience.
Colleen sports a bright red dress with a delicate silver necklace, as she is perched behind her drum set. As she plays, she bobs her head in time with the music, jerking it in such a way she seems to be swallowing the beat whole in continuous gulps. When she does this, her choppy brown hair falls into her face and Colleen laughs with a bright smile as she swings it out of the way.
“We started and anything I had been thinking about before during the day was gone the minute I started playing the first sounds I made,” Colleen said later. “I opened the show with just me playing, solo, the mallet just to let my mind focus and relax and hear my drums breathing and cymbals ringing and once that happened, boom, everything else was gone.”
Colleen, being a female jazz drummer, is a rarity in her music scene. Even at Purchase, where students are encouraged to “think wide open,” she is one of just five women in the jazz studies program, and she is the only female drummer.
“Just being a woman in jazz is different,” Colleen says, “Because, even today, in 2011, almost 2012, you don’t see a whole lot of women working in the jazz field. So we have to be that much better in order to make an entrance.”
Even before coming to Purchase, Colleen found that when she would play at band competitions in high school, such as All State or Eastern Region, she would be the only female in the percussion line. When Colleen first arrived to her students’ houses for private drum lessons (all, at the present time, are male) she was often greeted by confused looks from parents because they were not expecting a female instructor.
Nicole Zuraitus, the singer for the Colleen Clark Band, agreed that women jazz performers have to be determined and ambitious.
“Females in the jazz scene have to work twice as hard anyway because it’s a very masculine art form,” she said.
When Colleen first reached out to Nicole to sing in the Colleen Clark Band, Nicole said she was most intrigued by Colleen being a female drummer.
“I loved that idea of a woman playing a very masculine instrument,” she says, “And I’m serious, honestly, I said, “I wonder if she can play.”
Nicole soon learned that Colleen could play, and she found working with her to be a unique experience. She said that as a singer, she often found herself pushing the bands she played with to work harder, and that some performers didn’t care about her music, just getting paid for a gig. With Colleen, that wasn’t the case, and the two became good friends.
“I like playing with Colleen because she is sensitive and she anticipates where you are going in the music, so you don’t have to work as hard, because she is pushing you from below,” Nicole said. “I think Colleen has a lot of things working against her, but I think she’s a hustler.”
Kim Thompson, one of Colleen’s professors at Purchase who is most known for her work as a drummer with Beyonce, said she has never faced any hardship being a woman in jazz.
“I believe to be successful takes challenging work and a dream,” she said. “I believe I’ve been hired for my talent, being a woman was an added bonus, and I’m grateful for that.”
She added that the only challenge she saw was remaining “humble with grace.”
Colleen spent her childhood growing up on her grandparents’ organic vegetable farm in Cold Chester, Conn. Her parents lived in a house on her grandparents’ property, so most of Colleen’s days were spent in the sun, riding horses and helping out on the farm.
“It’s a great thing.” Colleen says, “I remember being a kid and running around and having a lot of space, being outside 10, 12 hours a day.”
While life on the farm is one of the most beloved aspects of her childhood, big city lights always called to her.
“I always had big dreams about playing in New York,” she said, adding that her family had taken her into the city for shows on weekends, and it became her dream destination.
Colleen’s dreams are one of her most distinguishing features. She speaks of them often and vibrantly, with a genuine excitement for her future. Her professors said the same.
“I saw that she had a dream, and she was very intelligent when it came to her craft and was influenced by so many genres of music,” Kim Thompson said. “Her playing has become more delicate and musically atmospheric. I couldn’t have asked for a better student.”
Gordon Stout, a professor of musical performance at Ithaca College, where Colleen received her bachelor’s in music performance and education, has played gigs with Colleen on multiple occasions. She was the bass marimbist for Gordon’s Ragtime Marimba Band for three years while at Ithaca, and also performed with him in his faculty recital.
“Her drive and ambition are guided by her love of music generally, and specifically her love of performing,” Gordon said. “She’s never afraid on stage, which is one of the reasons I felt so comfortable performing with her.”
While Colleen may appear fearless when she’s performing, she admits that there used to be many aspects of her performance she was insecure about. With the debut of the Colleen Clark Band, however, she plans to overcome them.
The band’s music and lyrics are all written by Colleen, and began as just her singing and humming the melodies and uploading the recordings to SoundCloud, which is essentially a social media Website that allows its users to easily upload and share recordings. From there, she added piano and guitar to her voice. A month ago, she updated the recording with a full band and Nicole Zuraitus singing.
Sept. 16, Colleen debuted her hard work, but not without some fears.
“It’s a scary thing,” she said. “It’s your baby. I’ve been working on that music for a while, I mean, you see the different stages of it and it’s just incredible.”
“Playing in front of people,” she continued, “You never know who’s in the room.”
Besides this stage fright, Colleen was also insecure about the sound of her own voice, having never sung professionally before. The first time she began to do so was while working at “Music for Aardvarks” in Larchmont, N.Y. At these “mommy and me” music classes, Colleen plays drums and sings with the other performers and the children.
“I started singing back up at work a little bit and I was like, I can do this,” she said. “The musicians there were like, Colleen, you sound good, just stop being scared and do it.”
So she did.
When Colleen feels lost, or insecure, she remembers something Gordon Stout told her: “Remember in the beginning, there was the drums. That’s all it was. Drums and voice.”
“I told her to trust her musical intuitions and ideas,” Gordon explained. “And that they were good, almost always in the right direction, and she could rely on them in performance.”
“People are more passionate about what they love, and they are passionate because they aren’t scared,” Colleen says with a determined smirk. “I just am going to be me, and play, and have no more fears, no more nerves, and just play.”
**Photos courtesy of Colleen’s Facebook