With Trio, Clarke gets back to bass-ics

Stanley Clarke has spent the past year reuniting with his first loves: jazz and the acoustic bass. Most visibly, Clarke, 54, has done so touring with Trio, the all-star, all-strings ensemble he put together with violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and banjoist Bela Fleck. That group's flashy chops went over big at the Newport jazz festival last month, and they're coming to Symphony Hall Oct. 11. It will be the first time Clarke has played Symphony Hall, he says, since his days touring with Chick Corea in their pioneering 1970s jazz-rock fusion group Return to Forever. Clarke's monstrous technique did much to legitimize the electric bass as a serious instrument in those years. But more recently he had largely disappeared from the jazz scene, having turned his attention to composing scores for television and film.

''That was mainly in the '90s," Clarke explains from Sacramento, where Trio was in the midst of a West Coast tour, ''and to be quite honest, I was going through a divorce. I didn't really realize until recently how much that affected me. I just kind of lost the desire to want to come up with something fresh, and I had always liked writing music for films. . . . So that was what kind of carried me through the '90s."

One exception was a mid-1990s tour with Ponty and guitarist Al Di Meola, which resulted in their 1995 CD ''The Rite of Strings." When Di Meola was unable to reconnect with the others for a reunion this year, Clarke suggested Fleck as a replacement.

''When you think of the instrumentation, it's kind of an odd pairing," says Clarke. ''But I think just because of the musicianship -- and also sonically, none of the instruments really conflict with each other -- it just kind of worked. It's nice to see something that's fresh."

In one sense, Trio is a misnomer: Roughly half of a typical Trio set gets devoted to each man taking a turn dazzling the audience alone. Clarke takes his on acoustic bass. ''That was the best thing about this year," he says. ''I mean, I can't remember when I just played all acoustic bass for a full year. So my chops are really coming back. I kind of joke around with people and tell them that the electric bass was kind of a hobby for me. But it really was."

Clarke says his forays into fusion, film scoring, and other forms of pop music were digressions, too. ''I actually never really lost the love and the desire for playing jazz music, what we jazz purists or people that really understand jazz know it to be," says Clarke. ''But I tried many other things, because that's just my nature."

Stanley Clarke a ''jazz purist"?

''I don't know, maybe 'purist' is not the right word," he says. ''But I love that music. It's sacred to me, and I feel like I have to protect it."

He's begun getting busy playing it again as well. Gonzalo Rubalcaba hired Clarke for a trio album recently, with fellow fusion refugee Harvey Mason on drums, and Clarke plans on touring more extensively with his own quartet next year.

Then there's the new album Clarke is plotting.

''I'm working on a solo bass album," he says. ''That's the thing that I've been thinking about for about a year now. I'm working up a couple Bach pieces, and it's going to be just solo bass. I was thinking about doing it years and years ago, but I just wasn't ready. I'm ready now. I'm really ready."