In the end picking up both might be worth while (since the two languages can interact with each other in reasonably sane ways thanks to both being JVM languages

In the end picking up both might be worth while (since the two languages can interact with each other in reasonably sane ways thanks to both being JVM languages) but similar to others comments I would start with Clojure as it really feels so powerful. All the advantages people have been praising Lisp for over the years but with massive block of available libraries really is a powerful thing. I can't comment on the scala community since I don't hang there, but I can also say clojure's will certainly be glad to help, the majority are amazingly friendly on freenode for IRC as well as the google group.