It’s not every day Constellation’s view from the street is blotted out by a tour bus wider than the venue itself.
Then again, it’s not every day a musician of Christian McBride’s stature rolls into the intimate North Center venue. McBride is one of the most admired bassists of his generation, a Grammy winner eight times over, a syndicated radio host and the artistic director of the titanic Newport Jazz Festival. He tends to headline the city’s hugest stages, like Orchestra Hall and Millennium Park. By contrast, Constellation has carved out a niche in the city for all things experimental and offbeat. Turning just a decade old next month, it tends to both punch above its weight and do things a little more on the DIY side. Which did not escape McBride’s notice when he played two sets there with his New Jawn quartet Thursday night.
“Last time I was here (in 2017), there was no stage.” He gestured to the modular bandstand under his feet, assembled for the show. “Looks like things have been on the upswing.”
McBride and Constellation might have a history that makes the latter ripe for ribbing, but it was a venue debut for his band: trumpeter Josh Evans, reedist Marcus Strickland and drummer Nasheet Waits. New Jawn’s ranks come from all over the eastern seaboard, but the name is a tribute to McBride’s upbringing in Philly, where “jawn” is a catch-all noun. (Example sentences provided on the cover of the group’s self-titled album: “Hey man, did you see McBride’s in town this week with his new trio?” “Naw, bruh, it’s not the trio, he’s got a new jawn!“) New Jawn’s 2018 debut was funky, fun and tight as hell, a welcome addition to the pantheon of chordless jazz combos. But was it great? Debatable.
With its latest album “Prime,” New Jawn has hit its stride. The compositions better bottle the smirking virtuosity of McBride’s formidable colleagues, seizing on the off-the-wall harmonic freedoms possible when you aren’t anchored by a keyboard. Big-band politesse has been tossed to the wind, or maybe burned.
So it was Thursday. Some audience members — notably older than the usual Constellation set — visibly gaped when McBride cued the band directly into the cacophonous intro of “Head Bedlam.” Strickland’s bass clarinet and McBride’s bass eventually coalesce into a thick, sauntering funk groove, forming cosmos from chaos. (McBride later joked with the audience that the number was “a sonic portrait of us looking at Twitter … The groove is what happens when you put your phone down.”)
“Obsequious” hurtled even faster in New Jawn’s first set than it does on “Prime.” But the band’s tight sense of ensemble didn’t crack one bit, the knotty opening played in razor’s edge rhythmic unison by the pitched instruments before opening into a solo by Evans. Evans is tall, unassuming and almost monklike onstage, curling around his instrument like a shell. But out of his bell came some of the most blistering improvisations of the evening, hard-bop restlessness conveyed through a dusky, veiled sound that never overpowered his colleagues. Evans often stepped off the stage so as not to block sightlines of Strickland, who distributed his economical, deftly pivoting solos (especially in “Prime,” the title track he composed) between bass clarinet and tenor.
“Dolphy Dust,” Evans’ aptly named contribution to “Prime,” passed that semi-manic energy around to the entire band in the second set. Their precision was just as remarkable here. The Jawns doubled their soloing colleagues so neatly that it called to mind assembling a jigsaw puzzle on the back of a high-speed train.
The lion’s share of that astonishment has to be funneled toward Waits, a marvel when both soloing and supporting. His farsighted and magisterial spotlight in “Obsequious” opened up into a deep disco backbeat, ushering the band into “Open Sesame” (as in “Saturday Night Fever,” not Freddie Hubbard’s 1960 debut of the same name). During Waits’ solo in “Prime” — an unbroken, maximalist explosion of wit and might — McBride just leaned against his bass and grinned, watching him in stupefied ecstasy.
McBride is a consummate collaborator, and one got the sense here that he really intended for it to be the band’s night. But he still made off with a few solos on his upright — in Waits’ elemental “Moonchild,” Evans’ “Pier One Import” and his own “John Day” — that demonstrated why he’s working with an expressive palette wider than just about any bassist on the circuit today. McBride tossed off right-hand impressionistic percussive effects, left-hand vibrato trills and divebombing glissando fills with both ease and impregnable intonation — itself a testament to his hyper-rigorous early jazz education in Philly.
The band closed out the evening by reprising “The Good Life,” also played during the first set. That tune was Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny’s head-turning calypso rebrand of a movement from Coleman’s “Skies of America,” written for the London Symphony (1972). Sunny and breezy, “The Good Life” is a far cry from Coleman’s better-known free jazz abstraction. But hearing it, the pairing makes a whole lot more sense than you might think. Just like New Jawn at Constellation.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.