StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Christian McBride's New Jawn

This week, let's take a look at some videos of bassist Christian McBride's New Jawn, who will be in St. Louis to perform starting this coming Wednesday, November 29 through Sunday, December 2 at Jazz St. Louis.

A man of many musical projects, McBride has played at the Bistro several times in recent years with both his trio and his Inside Straight quintet, and also leads a big band, which hasn't toured extensively for the usual economic reasons, but won a Grammy Award in 2012 and again in 2018.

His latest group, the New Jawn - "jawn" being Philadelphia lingo for a person, place or thing, sort of like film director Spike Lee's use of "joint" - is a quartet notable for the absence of piano, guitar, or any other chordal instrument.

Along with McBride, the group includes drummer Nasheet Waits, tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and trumpeter Josh Evans, and though they've been gigging intermittently for a couple of years, they just released their self-titled first album in October on Brother Mister Productions, which is McBride's imprint for Mack Avenue Records.

You can hear some of the material from that album played live in today's videos, starting up above with "Pier One Import," recorded in September 2018 at the studios of public radio station KNKX in Tacoma, WA.

After the jump, you can see New Jawn perform two more songs from their debut album, "Ke-Kelli Sketch" and "Middle Man," both from that same session at KNKX. That's followed by a full set of music, including versions of most of the tracks from the album, recorded in July 2018 at the Malta Jazz Festival.

The last two videos, "United" and "Via Mwandishi," offer a glimpse of the band at an earlier point in their development (and of a couple of songs that didn't make it on to their record), as documented in July 2017 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

For more about Christian McBride's New Jawn, read the reviews of their album from DownBeat and AllAboutJazz.com; this review of a gig last June in New Zealand; and the feature from KNKX that goes with the tracks they recorded there.