Christian McBride isn’t in Arlington, Texas at Regent Theatre on Sunday, 7 April 2024.

He’s in Arlington, Mass!

Ely Perlman, Mike King, Emilio Modeste, and Savannah Harris fill out a jazz quintet on McBride’s current international tour.

The 13th Annual Arlington Jazz Fest? Not such a lucky number, but any music festival that makes it into its thirteenth year is no stranger to luck.

How’d the fest get this far? The same way most arts enterprises do in this desolated American landscape of austerity politics and consumer culture. Form a 501(c)3 and beg for money.

The mission of the Arlington Jazz Inc. 501(c)3 is to raise awareness and appreciation of jazz through the confluence of top performers, local rising ensembles, and student groups while fostering a sense of community and helping to make Arlington and surrounding towns a cultural destination.

Sounds good!

Organizer Dan Fox and the rest of the Board of Directors have done a bang-up job making Arlington into a destination for jazz music and community, year after year. The 2024 edition of the festival included four nights of programming, featuring local, national, and international artists, playing at venues all over town.

There’s an interview with Dan Fox, a bit out of date, at the Arlington Jazz website, if you’d like more background. But one quick take away from the conversation?

If you build it, they will come.

Contemporary titan of jazz Christian McBride dropped by the Regent Theatre for the 13th Annual Arlington Jazz Fest. It was the fourth stop on a four-and-a-half week tour that will perform dates on both sides of the Atlantic.

The virtuoso bassist led a lively quintet, accompanied by promising young jazz musicians Ely Perlman (guitar), Emilio Modeste (saxophone), Mike King (piano), and Savannah Harris (drums).

With the show sold out for weeks, McBride could well expect an eager crowd. He didn’t disappoint, gracing the Arlington stage with a warm musical personality that is at once both approachable and profound.

The set started off with a rendition of Donald Brown’s “Theme for Malcolm” followed by a version of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance,” “reimagined” by pianist Mike King. The one-two punch provided ample opportunity for individual spotlight solos, and established a historical frame of reference that would be in play the rest of the night.

At 51, with a long litany of accomplishments in jazz music and community, Christian McBride is at a pivot point in his career. Too young to be considered a living legend, too old to be part of any new wave. His solution on Sunday night was to have his cake and eat it too, paying respects to jazz tradition with renditions of classics from his own youth, like the openers, while letting the youth in his quintet get their shine.

Case in point, the quintet performed the original composition “Elevation” by the guitarist Ely Perlman, prefaced by an appreciative intro from McBride. Perlman’s composition swims in the seas of contemporary jazz meets ambient. A minimalist approach, opened up with processed electric guitar, which favors texture and mood over extended virtuoso spotlighting. Or as McBride framed it with a grin, this cat is “anti jazz” and “doesn’t like long solos.”

When McBride wasn’t shouting out jazz greats like Correa, Brown, and Hancock, he was cheerleading his own band’s collective and individual accomplishments. Let it be known that some assemblage of the musicians that night also play in a separate band, and they will release a 7-inch on vinyl, and that vinyl is great, and that vinyl is making a comeback, and so much more…

The name of the actual band and the name of the actual release were lost in the enthused alluvial flow of McBride’s stage banter. But if anyone caught either, you can let this writer know in the comments.

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