Grammy Award winner Christian McBride is widely acclaimed as one
of the premier jazz bassists in the world. In an amazing professional
career that began in 1989, the Philadelphia native has been featured
on hundreds of albums, touring and recording with artists such
as David Sanborn, Chick Corea, Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole, George
Benson, and the late greats Joe Henderson, Betty Carter and Milt
Jackson.
McBride’s own recordings – including the critically acclaimed SCI-FI (2000), Vertical
Vision (2003), Live at Tonic (2006) – have encompassed
a diverse canon of original compositions and imaginatively arranged
covers that reveal the totality of his musicianship. In 2009, McBride
signed with Mack Avenue Records and released his debut recording
for the label, Kind of Brown. The album features McBride’s latest
working band, Inside Straight.
But McBride’s prowess as a player is only half of what makes him
such a highly respected artist. He has held artistic director posts
at Jazz Aspen Snowmass summer program and the Dave Brubeck Institute
and is co-director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem. He has also served
as Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and
was appointed artist in residence for the 51st Annual Monterey
Jazz Festival.
As a composer, McBride was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center
to write "Bluesin' in Alphabet City," which was performed
by Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In 1998,
the Portland (ME) Arts Society and the National Endowment for the
Arts awarded McBride with a commission to write THE MOVEMENT
Revisited.
McBride was recently voted “Acoustic Bassist of the Year” in DownBeat’s
57th Annual Critics Poll and was also nominated for an NAACP Image
Award for Kind of Brown.
