Christian McBride's New Jawn
Saturday, April 1, 2023
Knoxville, TN @ Knoxville Civic Auditorium - Big Ears Festival - 1pm

Shure MV88 > iPhone 12 > Motiv Audio App > WAV (24/48) > CD Wave Editor (tracking) > FLAC (24/48)
Recorded by Funk It Blog from second row left.

01. Head Bedlam [McBride]
02. Obsequious [Larry Young] > Open Sesame [Kool & The Gang]
03. intros by Christian
04. John Day [McBride]
05. Dolphy Dust [Evans]
06. Moonchild [Waits]
07. Prime [Strickland]
08. The Good Life [Ornette Coleman]

Christian McBride – bass
Josh Evans – trumpet
Marcus Strickland – tenor sax & bass clarinet
Nasheet Waits – drums

Words by Nate Chinen:
Waits was an MVP in the Tarbaby set — as he was the following afternoon at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium, with Christian McBride’s New Jawn. His hookup with McBride is like just-barely-set concrete, and he contributed the set’s most delicate composition, “Moonchild,” which elicited an exquisite arco bass intro. Elsewhere there were nods to Eric Dolphy (“Dolphy Dust,” by Evans) and Ornette Coleman (his own heraldic “The Good Life,” set as a cool calypso). McBride has led more than his share of heavy bands over the last 30 years, and this is decisively one of his best.

I’d been chuffed about McBride’s first visit to Big Ears, because I knew that the eager, open-minded audiences would impress him as much as the institutional skepticism over genre pieties. He was scheduled to sub for Bill Laswell in Zorn’s grindcore trio Painkiller, for crying out loud! Alas, it was not to be: hours after his commanding New Jawn concert, McBride came down with a fever. He tested positive for the flu, and had to call off all his remaining Big Ears commitments. Painkiller went ahead with Trevor Dunn, a longtime Zorn compatriot, and it was galvanizing — though I wish I could have heard the Mahavishnu-funk enlightenment McBride was likely to bring.

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