“To lead the house band at Minton’s [Playhouse] Teddy Hill hired the very man he had fired less than a year before. Kenny “Klook” Clarke. . . . “Klook,” Clarke’s nickname, had arisen from the onomato-poetic klook-a-mop, a kind of double bomb, one of Clarke’s favorite percussion figures. . . . Now . . . Teddy Hill though about the bombs, the jagged zigzaggy rhythms that somehow worked, and . . . offered him the contract. . . .”

—Ross Russell, from Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973.