Christian McBride may very well be the hardest working man in jazz, a title that would surely please him as a devoted James Brown historian and fan. Arguably the most accomplished bassist of the last 20 years, McBride leads numerous bands including Tip City, New Jawn Quintet, Christian McBride Big Band and the Christian McBride Trio, while still leaving time to tour with artists such as Pat Metheny and Bruce Hornsby. He also serves as the artistic director for the Newport Jazz Festival and Montclair Jazz Festival. A product himself of some stellar music education programs, McBride pays it forward by overseeing jazz education programs at Jazz House Kids and Jazz Aspen. Like one of his mentors Wynton Marsalis, McBride has become a champion for the music in the mainstream media, as host of the WBGO/NPR program “Jazz Night in America” and the SiriusXM show “The Lowdown: Conversations with Christian.” We’ve likely missed other projects and roles, but isn’t that enough?
Given all those demands, you can well understand why an album like The Movement Revisited would take so long from germination to album release. But, as he explains in this conversation recorded on The Jazz Cruise, his own schedule was only part of the problem. Originally created in 1998, the project looks at the Civil Rights movement through the words of four icons in African-American culture: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X and Muhammad Ali. With the help of gospel legend J.D. Steele, McBride composed and arranged music for a big band and gospel choir to accompany the words of these four very different shape-shifters. The album is as compelling and powerful as the subjects themselves.
McBride hails from the city of Philadelphia, known to its residents as Philly and never as the City of Brotherly Love, and the legacy of that city is central to his outlook on music, culture, race, politics and, of course, sports. There is no more avid Philly sports fan than Christian McBride, but that is for another story and another time. This story is about how and why he came to celebrate the work of four major figures in America’s history.
Lee Mergner: You grew up in Philadelphia—a city with a rich history of both jazz and segregation. You left the city at a relatively young age—at around 18 years old. How did that city shape you musically and personally?
Christian McBride: This is probably the case for most people, but I didn’t realize just how great a city Philly was until I left Philly after I finished high school. Obviously, I love New York because it’s like the central nervous system of the whole world, especially for jazz, but the longer I stayed away from Philadelphia, I realized what a culturally rich that place is. The history, not just the music, and how that city has impacted our country. I always say that the first few names you learn when you come from Philadelphia are Ben Franklin, William Penn, Betsy Ross, John Coltrane and Gamble & Huff.
I think because of my family – my father [bassist Lee Smith] and my great uncle being musicians and my uncle working for WHAT radio – black culture in terms of the civil rights movement and music were one and the same to me. My grandmother saved all of her old Ebony and Jet magazines from the 50s, 60s and early 70s. That stuff was absolutely fascinating.
That’s primary source material because so much of the events and personalities weren’t covered elsewhere in the mainstream media.
Correct. To read contemporaneous writing of news events that are now historic was fascinating to me. To read the April 15 issue of Jet magazine covering Hank Aaron’s 715th home run. Or to read the 1965 issue of Jet magazine right after Medger Evers was shot with fresh details. Or reading stories about black mayors like Walter Washington, Kenneth Gibson, Richard Hatcher and Tom Bradley. Then there were the local Philadelphia activists like Octavius Catto and Cecil B. Moore.
You were aware then of Catto who was from the 19th Century?
Absolutely. My grandmother didn’t talk a lot about what she saw for whatever reasons, but one thing she did talk about was that there used to be an O.V. Catto Social Club that had live music in the ‘40s. I said, “Grandma, who’s that?” So I learned about him when I was 9 years old. Uri Caine has an opera he’s written about him.
When did your family come to Philadelphia? Were they from the Carolinas as many Black families were in Philly?
Not that far South. My grandmother was actually born in Philadelphia. Her mother came from Western Pennsylvania. My grandfather was born in the Eastern Shore of Maryland in Princess Anne. My childhood summers were spent there where we had our family reunion. Most of my grandfather’s people are now in Tampa or Augusta, Georgia. Funny that I now have relatives in James Brown’s hometown.
My grandfather was in World War II and he was a mechanic in the Army. On the GI Bill he moved to Philly. For starters, most people don’t think McBride is an African-American name. He applied for this job with an auto service there and got them to hire him as a mechanic. When he showed up for work, they said, “Can we help you?” And he said, “Yea, I’m McBride reporting for duty, for my job.” They said, “You’re McBride?” He said, “Yea.” The guy said, “Wait a second.” The guy went into the back and then came back to say, “Sorry, that job’s been filled.” He said, “Look, I have a letter right here.” They said, “Sorry.”
What I’ve always learned from my grandfather and what I admire him for is that he would always tell me these things that happened to him in the military and after he moved to Philly, but he never had a bitter bone in his body toward anyone but those people individually. He never went around saying, “I’ve got to get revenge.” Or “We’ve got to balance this playing field.” My grandfather always said, “Judge everyone individually.”
It brings up that old question of whether someone was a Martin Luther King person or a Malcolm X person.
I think it’s pretty much generational. I think my uncle and my mom were King people, though that’s not entirely accurate. My mom is an amazing combination of both. I’ve always been very fortunate that pretty much everyone in my family always taught me never to hate or judge any group of people. They’d say, “Look you can screwed over by anybody and race has nothing to do with it, gender has nothing to do with it.” My family judged everyone individually. I now realize that’s sort of rare.
The Philadelphia that I grew up around about 10 years before you was very segregated.
Thinking about racism in Philly, I reference my grandfather because he was a letter carrier for the US Postal Service. He worked the whole city. And because he was a part-time cab driver, there was not section of Philadelphia he didn’t know intimately. I mean, little tiny one-block streets. Some of my fondest memories were that, on rare occasions, he would sneak me onto his truck while he’d make his deliveries.
Fun, right?
Greatest fun ever. Obviously, he was breaking a rule. My grandfather would always say, “Stay down, stay down.” I would go in the back and bury myself under the mail and throw it all around. I remember when we would get to the depot, there would be all kinds of cats there— Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and women too—and every single person loved my grandfather. “Hey, Tony, what’s happening?” Without saying a word, I remember seeing all these different types of people here getting along because they have a job to do. My grandfather was also the manager of the Germantown post office softball team. That’s where my love of baseball came from originally.
By the same token, the first time I got called the N-word was at at Veterans Stadium in the early ‘80s, when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was with my friend John Day and we went to get hot dogs. We stood in line and then I went to the bathroom. By the time I got out of the bathroom, John was up close to the front of the line. I went to join my friend. This guy yelled, “Get to the back.” I said, “No, I’m with my friend here, we’re together.” He said, “I don’t wanna hear it – get to the back of the line.” I said, “No, you don’t understand, my friend was holding my place.” This guy walked up to me and leaned over and said in my ear, “You little Black [N-word] – get into the back of the f-ing line before I hurt you.” So, I said to John, “I’ll meet you back in the seats.” John said, “What did he say?” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” I don’t know why, but it didn’t shake me up that much. When we got back to our seats, John asked me, “What did that guy say to you?” I told him what he said and John said, “Let’s go whup his ass.” Now, we’re 10 years old or so. I said, “No, it’s all good, man.” When I told my grandfather what happened, much later, he said, “Yea, that doesn’t surprise me—that would be an easy place for that to happen.” I remember my grandfather’s message that “You’ll be fine as long as you know that that’s not who you are.” I think that’s why it didn’t bother me that much.
I went to Pepper Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia and that’s where I started to take my first bass lessons and play in the orchestra. We had a jazz combo and we had a clarinet player named Karen Maiden who lived off Elmwood Avenue, which was a dividing line with north of it being African-American and south of it being white. She lived on the other side. She was just getting it together and she said, “I really like playing this jazz music, this is cool.” I said, “We should stay after school and practice.” She said, “That would be great.” We’d stay late after school and I remember that there was something about me dropping her off at her house. She said, “No, you can’t do that.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “They don’t like your kind in my neighborhood.” There was an innocence about it—she wasn’t saying it to be mean.
Yea, like it just wouldn’t be good for your health.
Once I got to CAPA [Creative Academy of Performing Arts], what I loved about it was that in many ways it was like this utopian world. There was the instrumental department, the choral department, the acting department, the creative writing department, the dance department… So we had a high school with nothing but creative minds. You had a lot of blacks, a lot of whites, Hispanics, Asians… That was my first time being around people who were unabashed about their sexuality. There were a lot of gay boys there at CAPA, and I thought as long as they could play or dance or write, who the hell cares who they’re attracted to. I remember being in this perfect atmosphere. It was the way you want the world to be. The only conflict I ever had at CAPA was that our school was across the street from a housing project. Often they would wait outside the school for those “sissy art students to come outta there—let’s get ‘em.” Many times we’d have to dodge our way through that. That was the only thing we had to deal with.
Now when I became a junior in high school, I started dating a girl named Sylvia Berry, who is still a good friend of mine. She was a violist and she was white. I remember her saying, “I want to meet your mom.” Growing up in an all-Black neighborhood, my family was cool, but I wonder what the rest of the neighborhood was going to think about this. I remember bringing her home the first time, I was scared to death, not because of my mother but because of the other neighbors. I felt like Karen Maiden in reverse. I remember walking down the street, feeling the eyes peering out from the windows. “Who is that?” I introduced her to my mother, “Mom, this is Sylvia,” and at no point did the conversation of race ever come up. I always deeply appreciated my family for that. I got a lot of comments from people in the neighborhood, but my family was always “We don’t care what a person is.”
Let’s talk about your “The Movement Revisited” project and album. I saw a live performance of the piece at the University of Maryland back in 2013.
The recording was made two days later. We went straight from Maryland to the recording studio. That show was on a Friday, and we had Saturday off, and we started recording on Sunday.
That wasn’t the beginning of the project. It was well before that time that you started writing and then performing it.
The Portland Arts Society in Maine gave me the initial commission in 1998. They were doing some Black History programming and they asked if I would compose something. The only stipulation at that time was that it had to involve a choir. I had no idea how to arrange for a choir. I’m still not that good at writing lyrics. I was quite trepidatious about accepting the gig but there was a guy named Bau Graves who ran the Portland Arts Society and he said, “Listen, I can put you in touch with a guy named J.D. Steele.” J.D. is as much [responsible for] this piece as I am.
At that time, the commission was to do four concerts—in Portland (Maine), Lewiston (Maine), Worcester (Massachusetts) and Hartford (Connecticut). They said, “Pick your own theme, do whatever you want, just make sure it fits for Black History Month.” I figured I would put music to the words of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X and Muhammad Ali.
Obviously those are four central figures, but why those specifically?
At the time in 1998, I was still 26 years old. I knew, or at least thought I knew, enough about the Civil Rights movement that I could write something pertaining to that, but let me pick four people who really meant something to me personally. I think after all the reading and research I’d done up to that point, those were the four people that really stood out for me.
What sort of reading did you do?
I think the hardest person to find material on was Rosa Parks because she’s not as well documented as the other three. She was the second woman not to get up and give up her seat on the bus. The Harvard professor Randall Kennedy wrote this amazing article on “respectability politics.” The idea is that there’s a certain way you should carry yourself if you want to accomplish things in life. It’s about the way things look. He made the case that the reason why Rosa Parks became the seminal figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and not Claudette Colvin was because Rosa was married, had a job, was of a certain age, while meanwhile Ms. Colvin was unmarried, had a child and was young. The idea was: “Our message will get over stronger with Ms. Parks.”
Trying to find certain words or quotes from Ms. Parks was a challenge. I met her at the 1987 Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, DC. I was doing a gig with Delfeayo Marsalis. Rosa Parks sat right in front. I couldn’t concentrate. I was playing the wrong changes the whole set. “Rosa Parks is sitting in front!” She was every bit as wonderful and gentle as you could imagine.
You used a beautiful bass interlude for the segment tied to her.
I used bass for her and Malcolm. Drums for Ali and King. It was fun trying to do all this research to pick certain quotes from each person that I enjoy. At that time it was just for a quartet, with a choir with four people doubling as narrators. We did those four concerts and JD and I shook hands and said, “Hopefully, we’ll work together.” We kept in touch.
Around 2005 I was named the creative chair for LA Philharmonic’s jazz programming. I started in 2006 for the 2006-2007 season. For the 2007-2008 season Laura Connelly [VP of Presentations] and I were talking about programming. I don’t know how she found out about the project, but she said, “What about that piece you wrote for Black History Month about 10 years ago – the Movement or something?” I said, “Really, you know about that?” I started thinking fast. I thought, “Well, I have the LA Philharmonic’s resources at my fingertips.” So I told her a little bit of a fib, just stretched it a little. “Yea, that’s a piece I wrote for a big band, a gospel choir and four narrators.” She said, “Hmm, that sounds ambitious, you wanna do it?” I said, “Yea!” Of course, I had backed myself into a corner, but it was a good thing because now I had to completely rewrite the piece for a big band. I took some time and the “new and improved” version of “The Movement Revisited” premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall in the spring of 2008.
There have been some large gaps there in the evolution of the project.
Since that time, I’ve had a chance to perform it on numerous occasions. It’s a really large project, so it’s not something that can get booked that easily.
Let’s talk about the voices of the four narrators.
When we did it at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2008, we had Wendell Pierce, who has pretty much always been MLK except when he’s too busy with his acting career. The late James Avery did Muhammad Ali. Loretta Devine was Rosa Parks and Carl Lumley, the actor was Malcom X. He did an amazing job. JD Steele conducted the choir of Sylvia St. James. It turned out to be such a great night. Word started to get around.
The following year I was asked to present it in Detroit. Teri Pontremoli was running the Detroit Jazz Festival and she said, “You should do that up here.” Instead of doing it at the festival, we did it at the 2nd Ebenezer Baptist Church in Detroit, Bishop Edgar Vann II’s church and we used his choir. Dion Graham became the voice of Muhammad Ali that night.
That’s where Sonia Sanchez [the noted poet from Philadelphia] came on as the voice of Rosa Parks. It’s interesting because most people would think in terms of personality that she’s like the complete opposite of Rosa Parks, because she’s part of the Black Arts Movement and a legendary poet. I thought that dichotomy would actually bring a really hip artistic spin to it. She certainly had no problem doing it. I knew she would read Rosa Parks’ words in her voice and rhythm.
The musicality of her reading is powerful. Like the way she repeats a word over and over, like a chant. That wasn’t in the original script, right?
No, she’s improvising. Since then, she’s been the only Rosa Parks. Except in Maryland where Dr. Ysaye Barnwell read it and Harry Belafonte read the MLK part. That was probably the performance that had the most gravitas because it’s Harry Belafonte.
When we played the piece in Ann Arbor, John Conyers came to the performance which was pretty heavy, because it added some authenticity to have him there in the audience. Obama had just started his first term when we performed it in Detroit. He’d been in office literally six months and Teri asked if I would be interested in expanding the piece to commemorate Obama. I remember thinking, “The man has only been sitting in office for six months, so it seems a little premature to write a piece for him, but not for the moment.” What I wound up doing was adding this fifth movement, more like a 4A, like a carry over from the King movement. I thought that that moment—the night of his election—was bigger than him. It seemed to me that his election was an apotheosis of what happened in the 60s and 70s. The title for that is “Apotheosis: November 4, 1998.” It consists of the four voices—Parks, King, X and Ali—reading Obama’s victory speech that night. And that’s how the piece has stood since 1998.
With a piece like this, you really had to deal with the issue of the estates of these public figures. What is involved with all that?
A lot of King’s words are published. There are books and copywritten speeches. You can’t just record them and put them out. Same thing with Malcom X. Same thing with a lot of the quotes I got from Rosa Parks’s books. Ali was not too hard in the beginning because a lot of his quotes come from interviews, so they weren’t copywritten speeches. When we finished this piece, the lawyers have to get to work and get the clearances for all of this and it was just a nightmare. We knew that the King estate was probably going to be something difficult to tackle, because what we understood was that there was no copywritten protection on his speeches for many many years. Within the last 10 years, his children really clamped down and said, “That’s it.” There were multiple lawyers to deal with on that front. By the time that it took to get all that legal clearances from the King estate, Ali died. That started a whole new round of talks with the lawyers and his estate. It took six years, and so here we are.
I remember how disappointed I was and we all were, because initially this recording was supposed to come out in 2014 or 2015. Ali was still alive and Obama was still in office. I remember thinking that this piece sort of missed its time, but I don’t feel that way any more. When you’re talking about something like this, the easy thing to say is Civil Rights, but the real issue is human rights.
You used Malcolm X’s words to make that point.
Exactly. That’s something that never gets old. This recording could have come out at any point and it still would have been relevant.
This interview was originally published in JazzTimes.
