Once a drummer has the clave under their feet — literally, in the bass-drum foot — the entire palette of fusion changes. Instead of the kick punctuating downbeats, it punctuates the clave figure. The rest of the body is freed up to play any vocabulary you like on top — funk 16ths, jazz comping, linear lines — and the groove still feels like it has a Cuban DNA because the foot is articulating a 5-note, 2-bar pattern that has been the backbone of Afro-Cuban music for centuries.
This was the great late-1980s/1990s fusion innovation — Lincoln Goines and Robby Ameen wrote the book on it (Funkifying the Clave), and Horacio "El Negro" Hernández, Dave Weckl, and Vinnie Colaiuta turned it into a vocabulary. The notation below uses two-bar layouts (bars: 2) with the kick clave written at its natural note values; rests in the kick voice are invisible because the hand voice fills the bar with continuous 16ths and already shows where every beat is.
Exercises
The kick plays son 3-2 clave across two bars — bar 1 has three hits (1, & of 2, 4), bar 2 has two (2, 3). The hands play steady 16ths on the hi-hat with a snare backbeat on 2 and 4 of every bar. The genius of this groove is that the backbeat keeps it sounding like funk, while the kick keeps it sounding like Latin — both at once, no compromise. Practise the kick alone first (mute the hands), then add hi-hat 8ths, then upgrade to 16ths, then add the backbeat.
Same idea as Exercise 1, but with rumba clave in the kick. The third hit of the 3-side moves from beat 4 (son) to the & of 4 (rumba) — one 8th later. That single 8th makes everything feel more urgent, more forward-leaning. The hi-hat is a steady 16th wash with snare backbeats on 2 and 4 — keep that obvious and let the kick foot do the cultural work. Notice that the rumba kick on the & of 4 of bar 1 lands a half-beat before bar 2 begins, pulling the listener into the 2-side.
Songo-funk: kick playing the songo bass figure (1, & of 2, & of 4 — that anticipatory pulse), snare playing a funk backbeat on 2 and 4 with ghosts threaded between, hi-hat steady 16ths. It's funk because of the backbeat. It's songo because of the kick. Both at once. This is the Goines/Ameen sound. The kick figure repeats every bar — unlike clave, which takes two bars to complete — so the songo pulse cycles twice as fast as a clave figure would.
The Goines/Ameen vocabulary in two bars. The c/5 voice on the snare is played as a cross-stick — laid stick across the head, butt clicking the rim — articulating the FULL son 3-2 clave on top of a steady 16th hi-hat. The kick reinforces every clave hit underneath. Clave is everywhere — in the cross-stick, in the kick, threaded through the hi-hat. The whole groove pivots on it. This is what 'clave-fusion' means in one phrase: the clave is not implied, it is the structure.