Christian McBride has always maintained a mixed portfolio as a bandleader. But as a bassist drawn to myriad forms of musical expression, he holds a special fondness for the sort of group that can stretch with him, covering the field as a matter of course.
Earlier this year, he played two nights at the Mercury Lounge in New York with the reunited Christian McBride Band — a turbocharged yet nimble four-piece that first turned this principle into practice during the early aughts, earning a following and no small acclaim.
McBride sees the same spirit in his newest band, Ursa Major, composed of exceptional younger players from a range of backgrounds. First formed in the summer of 2022, the group has coalesced on the road, establishing its own sound and spirit, as you can hear on its debut digital single, “More Is,” composed by its drummer, Savannah Harris. The song will be released next month as Side A of a 7-inch vinyl single from Mack Avenue Records; preorder here.
As always, McBride has many irons in the fire: last Friday saw the release of Trilogy 3, on which he plays with the late pianist Chick Corea and drummer Brian Blade. He’s gearing up to join Angélique Kidjo this Thursday at the Ralph Pucci Jazz Set, a benefit for Jazz House Kids, an educational organization founded and run by his wife, Melissa Walker.
He spoke with me about Ursa Major just as the band is about to embark on another tour, which kicks off at Artyard in Frenchtown, NJ on March 16 and then continues at City Winery Philadelphia on March 17.
You’ve got so many projects and responsibilities. What led you to form this group?
I started cooking this band up in my head probably around 2018. I knew that at some point I wanted to have what I call an “all-in” band. As you know, I used to call my old band, the CMB, a hybrid band, which meant we could kind of go anywhere, musically. I have these bands that sort of have a theme — you know, Inside Straight, The New Jawn, A Christian McBride Situation, Tip City. I knew that eventually I wanted to have a band that could combine all of those things in one group.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Oh, and I also specifically knew I wanted it to be a young band. So I started looking around and seeing who was out there, who I thought might be able to fit that sort of hybrid / all-in vibe. And
for a band like that, I feel that the drummer is key: I need somebody who can be funky, who can be free and who can be swinging, and just flexible. I called around to a few people, and they said you should check out Savannah Harris.
Right.
I think I next met Ely Perlman, our guitarist. He was my student at the Jazz Aspen summer program. I met him in 2021, and he just blew my mind. Most of the players that come to that camp, they're already right on the precipice of getting gigs. So that's where I met Warren Wolf.
That's where I met Christian Sands and Ulysses Owens, Jr. Jon Batiste was a student there. The Strickland brothers. The Rodriguez brothers. The Curtis brothers. They all were students at this summer camp, and so when I met Ely, I said, “Oh, man, this kid is nuts.”
Wow.
Nicole Glover, I got hip to her sort of the old school way — just chatter, word on the street. “Hey, man, this girl from Portland has come to New York, she’s taking everybody's gig.” I didn't need social media to discover her. So I got Nicole and Savannah together, and I said, “Who should I get on piano?” And they both said, “Check out Mike King.” And Mike was already on my list of piano players, and I knew him from seeing him play with Theo Croker. So we played our first gig in June of 2022, and this has pretty much been my main unit ever since.
There's a certain amount of solidification that happens when a group has been working, and you've had a few passes with this group now. Has the character of the band changed?
Well, it certainly is a well-oiled unit at this point. We're no longer reading the music, unless it's some brand-new music. Everybody feels really comfortable with each other now. That very first gig we played, it was kind of well-documented; we played the Jazz is Dead series out in L.A. I listened back to that gig, and then I listened to the gig we just did last week — and when it starts to sound like a band, you just know.
Yeah, it’s intangible but unmistakable.
And it’s funny. When we first started working together, Savannah was 27. Nicole was 28. Ely was 21. Mike might have been 29. So I know those first couple of gigs, it was really kind of sweet, but also very trippy to see — because they were visibly shaken. I said, “What's wrong with y'all?” And they were like, “We can't believe we're on the road with you.” I'm going, “Oh yeah — they think I'm an old cat. I'm in my fifties now. Oh.”
You're the Bobby Watson in this scenario.
Yeah, man, yeah. And so I had to step back and kind of catch myself for a second. I was like, “Man, this is really trippy.” But I like to think that those kinds of nerves are gone. Now, we know each other, and it's fun. Everybody has their own personality. Mike King watches boxing videos all day and all night, so we can bond on music, and Muhammad Ali. Nicole is just — she could probably run a company, because she's a great musician, but she's also a great thinker, a great organizer, almost like a business head. Ely is that sweet, innocent kid who just kind of trips over his own shoelaces. So you almost get the sense that he's still in college, even though he's not. He almost reminds me of a character in Saved By the Bell. And Savannah is just a pure soul sister from Oakland. She comes from the music; both her dad and her stepdad are respected musicians, and she just grew up around the stuff. So she's much older in spirit than she is in years.
Now, when you talk about the meld of personalities in a band, I have a fresh experience in my head because I was at the Mercury Lounge for the first of your two nights with a reunited Christian McBride Band.
Excellent.
But when you talk about the “all-in” band, I had almost forgotten what happens when the CMB turns on a dime from a driving backbeat into fast walking swing. And it was so cool to see the family back together.
Yeah, yeah.
Having just had that experience, and being out with a new band that’s just forming that kind of bond — do you have any thoughts about that?
I think my wife, Melissa, put it best. When she heard Ursa Major, she said, “Oh, I get it! This is your new CMB.” You know?
Ahh.
And I said, “Yeah.” I mean, if you want to oversimplify it. I like to think that there are elements of Inside Straight, elements of The New Jawn, and elements of The Situation, all in this one band. And when we did the Mercury Lounge reunion, I wanted to be surprised — but I was actually not surprised that all of that stuff came back instantly. Not the music part, but just the vibe. It was like we had never broken up, and it was amazing. Next year we're actually going to do a tour, and the plan is to get Live at Tonic reissued on vinyl.
It's interesting to think about Live at Tonic as a moment in your career, and how far everyone has come. Because that was a moment when your generation — Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton, Roy Hargrove — everybody was kind of making their eclectic moves. Saying “Yeah, you know me for this. But I've got all this other stuff that I'm really into and want to express.”
Right.
If it felt surprising at the time, it's almost like the default setting now.
Riiight.
And so the players in Ursa Major, their entire experience in the music has been with that model in mind. Can you reflect on that?
When you frame it that way, the first person I think of is Mike, because when he listens to music, he's listening to Bobby Timmons, Barry Harris, Hank Jones, Harold Mabern. But then, when we're warming up, he knows how to do the Ray Angry / Robert Glasper / Shedrick Mitchell thing.
Yeah.
And I'm looking at him like, “Who are you? I can't put a finger on you.” Then he starts telling me about how he had to learn to play organ in church, so he's got the church thing. He's got the R&B thing. He's got the hip-hop thing going on. But then, when he's listening to music on his phone, you know, it’s Horace Silver. At some point. I'm looking at him going: “Yeah, I kind of get it. For a guy your age, it's all part of one thing.” You don't have to concentrate on one thing to get to wherever you're trying to go, from a musical expression standpoint.
Right.
Ely comes straight from Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Julian Lage. He’s a pure guitar head. He brought some songs in that are Metheny-esque, kind of folky, you know. And
he talks about: “Man, that trio with Pat, you and Antonio Sanchez was such an inspiration to me.” And again I have to kind of snap myself out of it, because I'm thinking, “That trio's not that old. What do you mean it was an influence on you?”
[Laughs]
So yeah, I guess to all of these players, you're right. That is a default setting. And it's like their Roy Hargrove point of reference probably isn't Diamond in the Rough or Public Eye. It's The RH Factor, you know? And then maybe a much later straight-ahead record like Ear Food.
So let's talk about “More Is,” which Savannah wrote, and what it says about the band.
Well, right before we did our first gig in June of ‘22, I had all of the band members bring in music. I said, “I don't want you guys just to be represented as players. I want you to be represented as composers as well.” Everybody has something that sort of represents their core. Nicole brought in a hardcore swinger, probably something that you would have played at Smalls. Ely brought in the song that had that kind of folky guitar kind of vibe. Mike brought in a straight-ahead song, but it had that Glasper R&B / hip-hop underpinning, even though it was swinging. And Savannah brought in this kind of straight-up slow jam, you know.
Really.
And it was so sexy, I thought that no matter what this band plays, this stays in. And the single was mixed by Ben Kane, who also recorded and mixed Black Messiah for D'Angelo. He made that track sound like I'm pretty sure Savannah intended. Because when she heard it, she was like, “Yoooo, I’ve never heard my drum sound like that before!” I met Ben through Questlove, and Ben really hooked me up. He understood the DNA of the piece, and I think he brought that out.
I didn't know that about the mixing, but it makes sense, because the track is almost disarmingly, like, the next evolution of Quiet Storm.
Right? Right?
It’s not tilting toward R&B, it's really in there.
Also, I knew that I wanted to do a single. So we wanted to keep it short. Neither one of the songs on the 45 have solos, and I love it. I love the fact that no one's soloing. It's like just getting to the vibe of the song, getting to the vibe of the band. You'll hear plenty of soloing when you come hear us play live.
What does that say, though? That's not a move that would have come naturally at another point in time.
I actually am starting to feel that it’s more where I'm pointing to, in general. To make it overly pragmatic, you typically play 40 seconds of the melody, and then you expand on that melody and improvise for 10 minutes. No one hears that melody ever again. They've completely forgotten what you just played. They've probably forgotten the vibe in which the song was set up. And then you play 40 seconds of the melody to go out — and oftentimes in modern jazz, you vamp after that gorgeous 40-second melody, so there are 10 minutes of soloing in which you never reference it again. So I'm starting to just feel like: Let's figure out a way to balance it a little bit, or to never leave the melody behind. And I just thought, since we are doing a single, you can't go over four minutes. This is perfect; now we can't solo. [laughs]
In a way, what you’re saying makes me think of Horace Silver. He would figure out ways to just bring the form back in.
Yeah.
He’d punctuate the solo, or use interludes, so that there was a structural device.
I used to have a lot of conversations with Chick about Horace Silver, because he loved Horace Silver.
Right.
He basically said that was one of his foremost heroes in terms of orchestrating. Because Horace would have an intro, a melody, a shout chorus, solo background, another shout chorus, solo backgrounds, melody, coda.
And sometimes even the piano comping involved patterns he would introduce that were part of the composition.
Right? Right? And so I think that's not a bad way to think, when it comes to playing improvisational music. I think you can get more out of less.
Before I forget, what's behind the band name? Are you out here charting constellations?
No, not necessarily. I just randomly put like 30 names on a piece of paper. I thought there must be something related to the stars, or some sort of a cosmic thing I could come up with for this band. I showed it to my niece. I showed it to Melissa. I showed it to my manager. And I did it blindly; I didn't tell any of them that I'd sent it to other people. I said, “Pick three names from this list.” And the only name that was constant, all three of them picked Ursa Major.
Nice.
So you know, it's Ursa Major. There you go. I said, “All right. We can be the Big Dipper.”
Christian McBride & Ursa Major will release a 7-inch single in April; preorder here.
