Christian McBride returns to big-band format for disc ‘Without Further Ado’

When bassist-composer-bandleader Christian McBride returns to Orchestra Hall to kick off the 25/26 SCP Jazz series, he will team up with pianist Brad Mehldau for a duo set on Oct. 10. 

But his latest album, “Without Further Ado, Vol. 1,” which Mack Avenue Records will release on Aug. 29, features a big-band format for a star-studded affair with guest appearances by pop/rock, R&B and jazz luminaries Sting, Andy Summers, Jeffrey Osborne, Samara Joy, José James, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dianne Reeves and Antoinette Henry. They join McBride and his band in new arrangements of classic songs such as “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “All Through the Night,” along with ’70s/’80s hits such as LTD’s “Back in Love Again” and the Police’s “Murder by Numbers.”

“Without Further Ado, Vol. 1” marks McBride’s fourth big-band album; it is a follow up to “For Jimmy, Wes & Oliver” (2020, Mack Avenue Records), also recorded in a big-band setting. That disc received a Grammy in the category of Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album and earned one of the nine Grammys that McBride has received thus far. “I really enjoy writing for big band, because it’s a particular art form, writing for large ensembles like that,” he said in an interview posted Aug. 21 on the site rollingout.com. “I’ve been doing this now for a good 25-plus years, and so I enjoy writing for people to perform in my big band and writing my own music for the big band.”

McBride doesn’t take credit for the big-band revival. “I don’t know if I’m bringing the big-band sound back, because there actually has been a really good amount of big bands working under the scenes,” he said. “It’s just difficult to really maintain a big band, because it’s so expensive. You got 17 people in one band. You’re not going to get a long string of gigs without some sort of monumental [financial] backing.”

Of the great big-band leaders of the past, McBride said, “I think that the Count Basie Orchestra was probably the band that bred the longest list of arrangers. Quincy Jones, Frank Foster, Ernie Wilkins, Billy Byers, Sammy Nestico, so many great writers came out of that band. Yeah, I would love to be one of the writers for the Count Basie Band. But I feel very fortunate that I learned directly from two legends when it came to writing.”

Those two are bassist John Clayton and saxophonist Jimmy Heath. “John Clayton has been a great mentor,” McBride said. “The late Jimmy Heath was a great mentor, specifically when it came to big-band writing. Someone we lost [recently], the great [composer/bandleader] Lalo Schifrin, was someone who I had a chance to spend a lot of time with.”

As for “Without Further Ado, Vol. 1,” McBride is thrilled with the caliber of his recruits: “I got Jeffrey Osborne, I have Diane Reeves, but I have some people who folks may not know, like Antoinette Henry, a bad young sister out of Philly, who is going to be a serious problem out there in the jazz world one day. [We have] the great Cécile McLorin Salvant, José James, and so it’s a good mixture of the legends and the contemporary.”