Jazz bassist Christian McBride wants everyone to get on his ‘jawn’
First things first: Christian McBride’s New Jawn is coming to Houston Friday, and it would be perfectly reasonable for any non-Philadelphian to ask: what is a jawn?
“Most people who know me are not curious about that, because they’ve known the meaning of it from the beginning of our livelihoods,” says bassist and bandleader McBride in a recent video interview.
The answer: a jawn is a joint, or a thing, or an all-purpose, fill-in-the-blank noun. Questlove from The Roots, another Philadelphia native, is fond of using the word. There’s actually a funny bit in the first “Creed” movie in which Bianca (Tessa Thompson) hips her new friend Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) to the word.
Where did it come from? “It was probably someone mispronouncing something,” McBride says.
For more practical, specific purposes, Christian McBride’s New Jawn, which was also the title of his 2018 album, is a quartet featuring two horns (sax and trumpet) and no piano — in other words, no chordal instruments. Parts of the “New Jawn” album have an almost free jazz sound, or a concert in the studio.
For McBride, a former young lion who could now reasonably be considered an old master, that sense of freedom can take many forms.“There’s an accepted narrative that jazz is swinging, that it has an eightbar structure, that it has a familiar turnaround to it, a familiar feel to it, and that can be creatively confining,” he says. “But I think there’s plenty of freedom inside of structure. I think what actually makes freedom fun is that you break the structure. If you have no structure, you don’t have a lot of resistance, and if you don’t have any resistance, you’re not going anywhere. It’s running on a treadmill, but you’re going downhill.”
McBride loves his whole band, which includes Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Josh Evans on trumpet and Nasheet Waits on drums. But he sees Waits as the straw that stirs the drink.
“He’s always been part of groups that really straddle the fence between jazz and avantgarde, these kind of on-theedge groups,” McBride says. “You can’t really define them. He’s creative. He’s fiery. Every band I’ve ever put together, the drummer is the most important person, and the bass and the drums is the most important musical relationship. The personality of a jazz group tends to come from the drummer. Where Nasheet goes, the band goes.”
McBride has packed a lifetime of playing into his 50 years. He had just turned 18 when he joined trumpet giant Freddie Hubbard’s band. A very partial list of artists with whom he has played includes McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, James Brown, Benny Golson, Betty Carter, Chick Corea, Bobby Hutcherson, Johnny Griffin and Pat Metheny. “I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve had a chance to work closely with just about everyone I ever admired,” he says.
But he’s done more than that. He takes every opportunity to be an ambassador for the art form, whether that means hosting his SiriusXM show “Conversations With Christian,” doing a four-year stint as Creative Chair for Jazz with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or serving as artistic director of the storied Newport Jazz Festival. His mission is to make jazz more visible, one listener at a time.
“American culture is driven by what’s hot,” he says. “What can you make sexy? What can you make people want to buy? What can you make people want to do en masse? Most music that is not some form of pop, it’s going to struggle. So music known as classical music or jazz, where people play in halls and it’s not driven by subwoofers or dancehalls or light shows or 35 dancers onstage, most Americans tend not to want to hear it or see it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not great.
“I’ve never met anybody who has heard Miles Davis and didn’t like it. I’ve never heard anyone who has heard Louis Armstrong and didn’t like it. Most people say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know this existed.’ Well, how come they don’t know it existed? That’s part of my job.”