Kenneth Clarke Spearman was born January 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied vibraphone, piano, and trombone alongside drums while still in school, and broke into the profession as a teenager, working with trumpeter Roy Eldridge in 1935 and with the Jeter-Pillars band before joining Edgar Hayes' big band in 1937, with whom he made his recording debut and toured Europe. He went on to play in the orchestras of Claude Hopkins (1939) and Teddy Hill (1940-41); by Clarke's own account, it was Dizzy Gillespie, a fellow member of Hill's band, who recommended him for the job.

In 1941, Hill, by then managing Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, hired Clarke for the club's house band alongside pianist Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Joe Guy, and bassist Nick Fenton. The after-hours jam sessions there, with Gillespie and Charlie Parker among the frequent participants, became the incubator for what would be called bebop, and it was during this period that Clarke worked out the rhythmic vocabulary that reshaped jazz drumming: shifting the basic pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal and reserving the bass drum for irregular accents. The sound of a rimshot followed by one of those dropped accents earned him the nickname "Klook-Mop," later shortened to "Klook." He also became a composer during these years, co-writing two pieces that became jazz standards: "Salt Peanuts" with Gillespie and "Epistrophy" with Monk, both copyrighted in 1941.

After military service, Clarke rejoined Gillespie, recording small-group sides for Savoy in May 1946 ("Oop Bop Sh'Bam," "That's Earl, Brother") and, as a member of Gillespie's big band, the 1947 RCA Victor sessions that paired the band with conga player Chano Pozo on "Cubana Be," "Cubana Bop," and "Manteca," landmark recordings in the fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythm with bebop. He left Gillespie's band for a stretch to work with Tadd Dameron, Sonny Stitt, and Fats Navarro and to lead his own group, the 52nd Street Boys, before rejoining Gillespie in December 1947. Around this time, shortly after his military discharge, Clarke converted to Islam and adopted the name Liaquat Ali Salaam, under which he recorded at least one session, though he continued to perform and record as Kenny Clarke for the rest of his career.

Clarke was a founding member of what became the Modern Jazz Quartet, incorporated on January 14, 1952, growing out of the rhythm section of Gillespie's own big band with pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and bassist Percy Heath. He is the drummer on the group's earliest Prestige recordings, cut in December 1952 and June 1953 and issued as the 10-inch LP The Modern Jazz Quartet, and on John Lewis's "Django," recorded in December 1954. Clarke quit the group in January 1955, at the close of an engagement at Birdland, later explaining that he "wouldn't be able to play the drums my way again after four or five years of playing eighteenth-century drawing-room jazz." Connie Kay replaced him the following night. Freed from the Quartet's tightly arranged book, Clarke spent 1955 and 1956 as one of the busiest freelance drummers in New York while also leading his own Savoy dates, including Bohemia After Dark (1955), which holds the earliest recordings of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley and his brother Nat Adderley, and Klook's Clique (1956). In between, in April 1954, he had also been the drummer on Miles Davis's Walkin' sessions for Prestige, recordings widely credited with helping crystallize the harder-edged, blues-rooted style that came to be called hard bop.

In September 1956, Clarke relocated permanently to Paris, where he became a fixture of the city's jazz scene as a session and house drummer, working with visiting American stars and expatriates alike. From late 1959 he co-led a trio billed as "The Three Bosses" with pianist Bud Powell at Paris clubs including the Blue Note and Club Saint-Germain. In 1961, Clarke and Belgian pianist Francy Boland formed a big band that grew from a sextet into a full orchestra combining American expatriates with leading European musicians; billed variously as the Clarke-Boland Big Band and the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band, it recorded its debut album, Jazz Is Universal, in Cologne in December 1961 and remained active through the 1960s and into the 1970s, notably fielding two drummers, with British drummer Kenny Clare playing alongside Clarke. Other than occasional visits home, Clarke worked in France for the rest of his life and was regarded as a central figure of the European jazz scene.

Clarke was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1983. He passed away on January 26, 1985, at his home in Montreuil, a Paris suburb, at age 71, and was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1988.

Clarke's central innovation, moving jazz drumming's basic timekeeping from the bass drum to the ride cymbal and reserving the bass drum for irregular, syncopated accents, became the foundation of modern jazz drumming and was extended by nearly every drummer who followed him, including several who passed through the Minton's Playhouse scene he helped define. Where some of his bebop-era peers pushed toward increasingly explosive drumming, Clarke's own playing stayed comparatively understated and conversational, prized for its musicality and reliability as much as for its innovations. He was equally at home driving a small combo and anchoring a big band, a versatility borne out by his final decade and a half fronting the Clarke-Boland Big Band, where he shared the drum chair with a second player, Kenny Clare. He was also a credited composer, co-writing "Salt Peanuts" and "Epistrophy," both of which remain part of the core bebop repertoire.