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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZMcBRIDE, Christian(b May 1972) Bassist, probably the first in jazz since Charles Mingus and Ron Carter whose solos aren't used by the audience as a break to fetch a drink or relieve themselves; yet he knows that the bass player's job 'is to make everybody else sound good -- like Atlas, they hold the whole band on their shoulders' (interview with Martin Gayford in the Daily Telegraph). His father played electric bass and his great-uncle played acoustic, but he describes James Brown as his main man; after high school graduation he went to NYC in 1989 and was soon gigging as a teenager with Bobby Watson, Roy Hargrove, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Golson and Benny Green all at once. He is not only a superb musician, but plays into a microphone rather than plugging into an electronic gimmick, so that his instrument sounds like a bass; he gives Wynton Marsalis credit for this, who told him that he should find his own sound before allowing it to be altered. Other bassists who sound like cows with BSE should take note. 'The bass solos keep coming around like adverts on TV,' Duke Ellington once lamented, listening to a piano trio; Reginald Veal, a Marsalis protégé, is another bassist who plays an unamplified instrument, and whose solos are (not so coincidentally) rather more welcome than the adverts. McBride has played on a great many albums as a sideman, Joe Henderson's Lush Life one of the best known. He and drummer Carl Allen made two debut trio sets by young pianists, both on Evidence: Anthonyology by Anthony Wonsey and two-CD Nut by Cyrus Chestnut. His own first album as a leader was Gettin' To It '94 on Verve, with Chestnut, Hargrove, Joshua Redman on tenor sax, Steve Turre on trombone, Lewis Nash on drums ('Splanky' is a trio with McBride, Ray Brown and Milt Hinton, three generations of the greatest); followed by Number Two Express '96 on which Chick Corea guests, among others: on one track McBride is overdubbed playing four acoustic basses and one electric. |