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
c/5 voice as a cross-stick — stick laid across the head, butt end clicking the rim — spelling the full son 3-2 clave over the 16th hat while the kick doubles every clave hit. Cross-stick and foot must land as one; any flam and the structure blurs.