George Clinton gets to the bottom of funk with Berklee students

George Clinton

He started in doo-wop, then went psychedelic. Throughout the 1970s, his bands Parliament and Funkadelic carved out bold, crazy new spaces in rock and funk, deploying a cast of loopy, absurdist characters fresh off the Mothership - the UFO that for many years throned above their concerts.Samples of their music saturate hip-hop, and you don’t have to master the whole catalog to have danced a few times to classics like “Aqua Boogie,’’ “One Nation Under A Groove,’’ or the perennial “Flashlight.’’

What’s more, George Clinton is still at it, delivering at age 70 on a busy tour schedule with his P-Funk All-Stars, funking it up for audiences that invariably blend all generations and backgrounds.So you would think that with this 50-plus-year track record of innovation and influence, someone would have thought to award Clinton an honorary doctorate by now.

But apparently not. By the funk grandee’s own recollection, no university has seen fit to confer such an honor upon him. None, that is, until the Berklee College of Music, which receives him for a four-day visit that culminates Thursday with a concert featuring Clinton with members of the P-Funk horn section and Berklee’s own P-Funk Ensemble.

“I really don’t know how it came together, but I’m really glad they did it,’’ Clinton says in a phone interview. It’s not his first visit to Berklee, however. He made a quick stop at the school in 2006, walking into the student ensemble’s rehearsal to gasps of surprise, and jamming with them for a little while.

This week’s visit is a more lavish and organized affair, with rehearsals, class visits, and workshops for Berklee students planned along with the public concert, where Berklee president Roger Brown will bestow the honorary degree. And the concert will feature songs from different phases of Clinton’s career in new arrangements that the ensemble’s faculty leader, bassist Lenny Stallworth, has sent Clinton in advance.

The master is already impressed.

“I was surprised to find out that they thought so much of our music,’’ Clinton says. “I learned that you can actually orchestrate it, write the music down, and note it. They had all the rhythms noted, and even some of the hip-hop stuff that we did, they were able to note it.’’

If Clinton professes surprise, it may be because the P-Funk sound is famously sprawling, with the performers’ free-wheeling attitude seeming to extend into the music itself. But don’t get fooled, says Stallworth. There’s plenty of method to the madness.

“His music is more like organized chaos,’’ Stallworth says. “It looks like it’s not organized, but it’s very organized.’’