Double Bass McBride Interview for Open Studio

#3
Just a fantastic interview with a fantastic musician and figure in the landscape. @damonsmith , you need to weigh in on this. He echoes my thoughts perfectly here, especially on the subject of “jazz adjacent” musinpc. Mine are on a much smaller scale, of course, but the sentiment in a almost exactly the same.
 
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#4
"One foot in the past, one foot in the future with their body in the present". Heavy. What is nice is that Christian has become so much more important than Wynton. Wynton studied trumpet with Bill Fielder, the older brother of the great drummer I played with a ton, Alvin Fielder. So many of the horrible things Wynton did to the music actually came from Stanley Crouch.
A great poet I am playing with here grew up with Stanley. He met him in Jr. High - Stanley busted him in hall for not having a hall pass. Stanley was the hall monitor. My friend stayed lifelong friends with Stanley but said, "He was always predisposed to treachery and a snitch."
Stanley's band at one point was Mark Dresser, David Murray and James Newton on the West Coast and he went to the East Coast with David Murray's quartet. Wynton was playing with Lester Bowie in this time as well.
Stanley got a loft in same area as Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea. The lore is he tried make an opposing festival at the same time as Sam tried and they had words that ended up with Sam punching him in the face.

This drove the conservative push and Wynton became his lap dog. So, a lot of the pushing out of the jazz based avant garde players from jazz clubs and resources was deliberate and malicious. He couldn't really affect the top level musicians like Braxton, Cecil Taylor & the Art Ensemble. However, people like Oliver Lake, David Murray and their peers as well the generation under them basically had to go to Europe to work.
From Christian's side it became clear that the approach was stiffing the music, from the avant garde side it was far more damaging.
It is really great that Christian pushed past all that to become his own man. Playing with great musicians should be the goal. I rate playing with great pop musicians far, far higher than jazz covers of their songs.
I learned a ton playing Jim O'Rourke, Mike Watt, Richard Thompson & David Lindley. Christian & I are the same age, I have always felt a bit of a parallel with the way he moved through straight ahead to the way I moved through free music. He got more money - of course.
These Open Studio dudes are good players, they are around St. Louis. I have not crossed paths with them yet.

Wynton has gotten a lot from the music, however, his place in it will ALWAYS be in question since he used politics instead of his music to get where he is. Christian's place in the music comes from his bass playing. Unquestionably.
 
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#5
Damon, sounds like the makings of a monograph on the subject, if you care to pursue it; fascinating, if dismaying.
Don't know if you've read Victory Is Assured, a collection of Crouch's posthumous writings - with an afterward by Marsalis - it might be more grist for your thesis, which I thank you for posting.
 
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#6
vilshofen said:
Damon, sounds like the makings of a monograph on the subject, if you care to pursue it; fascinating, if dismaying.
Don't know if you've read Victory Is Assured, a collection of Crouch's posthumous writings - with an afterward by Marsalis - it might be more grist for your thesis, which I thank you for posting.
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Much like CMB, I am too busy with with the bass to write a book or bring in more of Crouch's darkness.
I always respected Christian, when I was younger I did lump him in with "those guys". I find him to be more and more inspiring all the time. He is a far better leader and spokesperson for the music than a classical trumpet player deliberately trying to hold the music back.
I felt like hearing him after listening to the interview and was impressed by this:
 
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#7
@sean_on_bass thanks for posting this interview. I'm about halfway through it, at the spot where CMcB mentions studying with Homer Mensch. ( I had no idea. wow!!) SO MANY thoughtful and salient points are being made in this talks it's hard to list them all.

I think CMcB has has a very good point about players being teachers. More specifically, players-as-teachers shirking commitments in higher education. A few years ago my college approached me about being the bass instructor. After saying i didn't feel qualified, I also added that I was going to be gone on tour most of the teaching semester and beyond. Thankfully they accepted that answer. I felt the weight and responsibility to be a teacher-in-residence, not a professor-in-absentia.

Mad respect to cats like @Chris Fitzgerald who love to teach and who are very good at it. I took your piano class at the Aebersold clinic in 2011!
 
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#8
He’s also a really thoughtful, genuine, and funny person. A couple of weeks ago he was in town to play a concert and got in touch to see if he could use my LaScala ply, which he was happy to use when his trio played our jazz fest at the U some years ago. On the phone, of course I agreed, and he asked if I use PayPal or Venmo. I replied “no, I use Karma”. Without skipping a beat, he said “Got it. Next time you come to NY, you don’t need to bring a bass”.

Later, when I went to drop off the bass at his hotel, there was this slightly drunk woman outside the entrance who overheard me telling the doorman that I was delivering the bass to Christian McBride. She said “that name sounds familiar, where do I know it?” The doorman replies, “he’s the best bass player in the world, maybe that has something to do with it.” About 10 seconds later Christian comes down from his room to pick up the bass in sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap and she goes up to him and says “this man says you’re the best bass player in the world?”. He smiles and says “I don't know about that, but I’m the best bass player in this hat!”

Does it get more down to earth than that?
 
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#9
damonsmith said:
So many of the horrible things Wynton did to the music actually came from Stanley Crouch.
Click to expand...

So much of life depends on chance. You go to one party, you meet a long-term partner. You go to a different party, you're swept up in bad choices.
I have often wondered how jazz in the late 80s and 90s would have been different if Wynton Marsalis had gone to the party where Wayne Shorter says, "Join me, won't you?"
Because there's no denying that Mr. Marsalis was and is capable of doing things on the trumpet that almost nobody else could ever do. He was young, he was charismatic, he was poised to bring people in one direction or another.
 
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#11
damonsmith said:
I felt like hearing him after listening to the interview and was impressed by this:
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Damon give this one a go.
I started to transcribe the bassline, but he's so low in the mix. I wonder, what would you call a transcription that was half his lines - the ones I could actually sort of hear - and half my guesses, or my own insertions - a "hybrid"? "Amalgam"?

 
#12
vilshofen said:
Damon give this one a go.
I started to transcribe the bassline, but he's so low in the mix. I wonder, what would you call a transcription that was half his lines - the ones I could actually sort of hear - and half my guesses, or my own insertions - a "hybrid"? "Amalgam"?

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Fantastic music, I know that one. I'd call that a much more useful transcription because it is already music you can use.
If you sort of shut your eyes and try to "play like _____" you usually get right to the parts you need for your work and none of what you don't need.
Transcription can be very valuable, but it can also quickly turn into "listening to your favorite albums while you should be playing Simandl".
 
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#15
damonsmith said:
Transcription can be very valuable, but it can also quickly turn into "listening to your favorite albums while you should be playing Simandl".
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Good point!
I avoid being distracted, or obsessed with, a particular transcription by pausing every 4 mm or so and manipulating what I've just transcribed: transpose it, or invert, retrograde, or retrograde-invert it (thank you, Alban, Anton, and, especially, Arnold), or maybe spin permutations on, say, a single 4-note measure.
Back to Christian: He deserves to be listened to, and transcribed.
 
#17
damonsmith said:
Much like CMB, I am too busy with with the bass to write a book or bring in more of Crouch's darkness.
I always respected Christian, when I was younger I did lump him in with "those guys". I find him to be more and more inspiring all the time. He is a far better leader and spokesperson for the music than a classical trumpet player deliberately trying to hold the music back.
I felt like hearing him after listening to the interview and was impressed by this:
Click to expand...

Okay, that's the good stuff right there. dang
 
#18
You know, I've never gotten much involved in Mr. McBride's music or personality, but most everything I see, I like.

There's something that isn't spoken about as much as it ought to be, I think which is the relationship of musicians in African-American improvised music to "the elders". James Carter made an album with that title, "Conversing with the Elders" I believe. McBride in his interview talks about his interactions with elders of this music (Betty Carter, Art Blakey, etc.), and now he is (and to a much lesser extent, I am) an "elder" too. McBride is 52, I'm 62, but I think there's a thread there, from older to younger, that we disregard at our peril. Maybe it's because almost my whole life the music that spoke to me came from folks who went before me, from Trane to Blakey to Hendrix, to Miles to Bix to Louis to Hawk.

I've never met the guy but he certainly seems like a good guy.
 
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#19
turf3 said:
There's something that isn't spoken about as much as it ought to be, I think which is the relationship of musicians in African-American improvised music to "the elders". James Carter made an album with that title, "Conversing with the Elders" I believe. McBride in his interview talks about his interactions with elders of this music (Betty Carter, Art Blakey, etc.), and now he is (and to a much lesser extent, I am) an "elder" too. McBride is 52, I'm 62, but I think there's a thread there, from older to younger, that we disregard at our peril. Maybe it's because almost my whole life the music that spoke to me came from folks who went before me, from Trane to Blakey to Hendrix, to Miles to Bix to Louis to Hawk.

I've never met the guy but he certainly seems like a good guy.
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Yeah, it is really, really important to get things passed down to you. I did it. In "creative music', "free music", "THE music" or whatever you want to call has really taken a hit in the last few decades in scenes like Brooklyn and Chicago with younger musicians playing with peers and depending on cute band names to get their music out there.
It has really held back the music. As I have said, so much of my concept of swing and time comes from Alvin Fielder's ride cymbal & Ra Kalam Bob Moses' hands. It is a bit unfair to try to explain it without admitting that. Multi-generational ensembles push the music forward. The younger players traded energy for information - it isn't that simple, but it sums it up fine enough.
 
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#20
There is something to the above. I can’t claim to be an important player in a major market or even a large city, but the experience of playing with a bunch of elders over the years like Konitz, McPherson, Liebman, Fortune, Brackeen, Pizzarelli, Brubeck, Pilc, Nussbaum, Samuels, etc. can’t be overstated. They leave a mark on you even in a short time that stays with you.

The best we can hope as we become elders ourselves - even relatively minor ones in the greater scheme of things - is to leave a similar impression on the younger players we encounter along the way. That is what Mr. Zappa would have referred to as “the crux of the biscuit”.
 
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