Clarence Lacquese Penn was born in Detroit on March 2, 1968 and started on drums at around eight. In 1986, while still at high school, he attended the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, then enrolled at the University of Miami the same year before transferring to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. There he studied with Ellis Marsalis and played in the pianist's trio from 1987 to 1991, a stretch that included a Japanese tour in 1990. His degree, taken in 1991, was in classical percussion rather than jazz, and the discipline shows in the tuned, deliberate way he uses the kit.

He moved to New York in 1991 and was working almost immediately. From about 1990 to 1993 he held a chair in Betty Carter's trio, the band that served as a finishing school for two generations of rhythm players. Carter's It's Not About the Melody (Verve, 1992) is the record that documents it, and it documents it precisely: the album splits its drum chair three ways, with Jeff "Tain" Watts on two pieces, Lewis Nash on five and Penn on four, playing opposite the bassist Ari Roland and the pianist Cyrus Chestnut. The following year he turned up on one track of Joshua Redman's Warner Bros. debut, alongside Christian McBride and Kevin Hays, with Gregory Hutchinson and Kenny Washington taking the rest. Work with Chestnut, David Sanchez, the Stephen Scott Trio, Joey Calderazzo, Jon Faddis, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Smith, Stanley Clarke and Tim Warfield followed through the decade, and in 1995 he joined Mike Mainieri's Steps Ahead for Vibe, an electric record on which he is the only drummer credited without a track restriction.

His own catalogue began at Criss Cross Jazz. Penn's Landing, cut in a single day at RPM Studio in New York on December 29, 1996 and released in 1997, is a pianoless quartet with Ron Blake on tenor, John Swana on trumpet and flugelhorn and Rodney Whitaker on bass, and three of its seven pieces are Penn's own; All About Jazz reports that the New York Times placed it among its ten best records of that year. Play-Penn followed in 2001, taped at Systems Two in Brooklyn on January 19 with the Dutch guitarist Jesse van Ruller added to the same band and three more Penn originals in the programme. Saomaye (Verve, 2002) is the outlier: a large, produced record made for the Japanese market on which Penn is not only the drummer but the producer, a credited engineer, a percussionist and a singer, with James Genus and Chris Minh Doky splitting the bass, Adam Rogers on guitar, Makoto Ozone and Edward Simon at the piano, Yosvany Terry on saxophone and percussion, and Luciana Souza and Claudia Acuña singing.

Three long associations define his sideman work. He joined Makoto Ozone's trio with the bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa for its first record, taped at Avatar Studios in New York on January 7 and 8, 1997 with John Scofield guesting on three tracks, and stayed with that group and with Ozone's big band No Name Horses into the 2010s. He took the drum chair in Dave Douglas's quintet for The Infinite, recorded direct to two-channel DSD at Avatar over three days in December 2001, and remained through Strange Liberation (2003), the Bimhuis and Jazz Standard live sets and Meaning and Mystery (2006), a band whose rhythm section paired him with James Genus under Uri Caine's Fender Rhodes and in front of Chris Potter, later Donny McCaslin. And he became the drummer of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, working under Jay Anderson's bass on Concert in the Garden (recorded March 8 to 11, 2004), Sky Blue (January 2007) and The Thompson Fields (August 2014). The first of those won the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2005 and entered the National Recording Registry in 2019; the third won the same award in 2016; and Sky Blue carries "Cerulean Skies," which took the 2008 Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. A fourth Grammy-winning record he plays on is Randy Brecker's 34th N Lex, Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2004, though his part in it is narrower than it looks: he drums on three of its eleven tracks and does not appear in the album's release-level credit list at all. He also toured with Michael Brecker's band in 2001 and 2002, in a quartet with Adam Rogers and Scott Colley, work that survives only on unofficial concert issues rather than on a studio album.

From the mid-2000s his leader and co-led records came steadily. A Master's Diary (CAM Jazz), a trio with Edward Simon and Scott Colley taped at Sear Sound in July 2006 with Diego Urcola guesting on the opening track, waited six years for release. Kind of Trio (Via Veneto Jazz, 2011) is a pianoless date with the Italian tenor player Max Ionata and Reuben Rogers, recorded in Rome that March, and the same three plus Daniele Scannapieco made Tenor Legacy in 2014. Dali in Cobble Hill (Criss Cross, 2012), cut on February 2 of that year, is a quartet of his own compositions with Chris Potter, Adam Rogers and Ben Street. Then came the band he named after himself. Monk: The Lost Files (Origin, 2014), credited to Clarence Penn and Penn Station, was recorded in February and March 2012 at his own Brooklyn studio and at Tedesco Studio in New Jersey, with Chad Lefkowitz-Brown on saxophones, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Donald Vega and Gerald Clayton sharing the keyboard chair; ten of its eleven tracks are Thelonious Monk's, the eleventh is Penn's, and he plays organ on one piece himself.

Behind the Voice (Origin, 2024) is the most unusual thing in the catalogue: nine tracks of songs written by drummers, or by the rhythm players behind them, given full jazz arrangements. Stevie Wonder's "Send One Your Love" opens it, and the programme takes in Peter Gabriel, Levon Helm and Larry Campbell, Prince with Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, Dave Grohl, Don Henley, Phil Collins and Steve Porcaro's "Human Nature" before closing on one of Penn's own. He produced, arranged, engineered and played drums, keyboards, percussion and vocoder on it, and the guest list runs from Kurt Elling and Toku on vocals to Gilad Hekselman and Adam Rogers on guitars, with James Genus and Yasushi Nakamura splitting the bass. Alongside it he has been the drummer in the American Patchwork Quartet, the band the guitarist Clay Ross founded with the singer Falu and Nakamura to rework Appalachian, gospel and folk material through jazz and Hindustani classical practice. Their self-titled debut appeared in February 2024, they played the Grand Ole Opry that June, and the record was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 67th Grammy Awards. Penn taught at the University of Central Florida as assistant professor of jazz percussion from 2021 and joined the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music in 2023 as assistant professor of practice in its Jazz Studies programme, where the school's own faculty listing still places him. He had earlier taught at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music from 2004 to 2012, at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, at the Saint Louis College of Music in Rome and at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Intensive Jazz Institute. In 2024 he made Fun One with Oz Noy, David Kikoski and James Genus, the guitarist's first record for Criss Cross.

Penn came to jazz through a classical percussion degree, and what that training left behind is an ear for the drum kit as a set of pitched surfaces rather than a rhythm machine: his cymbals are chosen for colour, his snare is tuned high and dry, and he is as likely to answer a phrase with a rimshot or a stick-on-shell click as with a fill. Maria Schneider, who has kept him in her orchestra's drum chair across three Grammy-winning records, describes him as a player with dynamic range and drama who thinks compositionally but works from instinct, and who knows when to stop and act as a colourist rather than driving the band; the singer Luciana Souza, who has hired him repeatedly, says he listens like a producer. Both descriptions point at the same thing, which is why his career has run in two directions at once. In a big band or behind a vocalist he is a supporting player of unusual restraint, audible on Concert in the Garden and on the ballads of Betty Carter's late trios. In a small group he is a forceful, densely detailed post-bop drummer, and AllMusic's own style tags for him, Post-Bop and Straight-Ahead Jazz, understate how much rock and pop time he has absorbed along the way. His own records make that explicit: Saomaye is built on Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythm as much as on swing, and Behind the Voice takes nine pop songs and rebuilds them without either apologising for the source or flattening it. He is also a working producer, credited as such on his own albums and on records by Melissa Walker, Makoto Ozone and Greg Germann, which is unusual for a drummer and consistent with the way musicians describe him hearing a whole arrangement rather than a groove.