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Christian McBride finds the groove again in his latest album, 'Prime'

XPN | By Raina Douris,
Kimberly Junod
Published August 1, 2023 at 8:25 AM PDT

When you hear a great jazz band perform, what you're hearing is a connection between musicians. Players who are on the same wavelength — and even when one plays a solo or goes off in their own improvised direction — it's all held together by the groove.

Christian McBride has spent his career laying down that groove as a jazz double bassist, appearing on innumerable recordings in a wide variety of genres, backing everyone from The Roots to Chaka Khan to Paul McCartney to James Brown. He's also put out his own Grammy-winning albums.

His latest album, with his band Christian McBride's New Jawn, is called Prime. It's his second album with that group and his 18th as a band leader.

Christian joins us to talk about falling in love with jazz and how he thinks about leading a jazz band from the bass player's position. You'll also hear the band perform live — beginning with the mind-boggling opening track from Prime, "Head Bedlam."

Copyright 2023 XPN
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Raina Douris
Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, is the host and writer of NPR's daily nationally-syndicated music interview and discovery program World Cafe. She has interviewed artists like Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Questlove and Brandi Carlile, and was a 2022 keynote lecturer on the topic of Folk Music and music discovery at the Chautauqua Institution.
Kimberly Junod
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).