Ray Brown & Christian McBride
Allmusic.com, December 1999
What were the odds that two of the greatest jazz bassists of all time would be in the smallish town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the same time? I have no idea, but I do know that one early afternoon back in 1999 Ray Brown and Christian McBride sat down with me in the offices of Allmusic.com to share perspectives on their art or, as I said in my original headline, get “on top of the bottom.”
Do I really need to summarize their respective bona fides? I think not; all the info you need on each is amply available online. Being a pianist myself, I will say that it’s like welcoming Art Tatum and a young Oscar Peterson to talk shop.
Or, actually, maybe not exactly, the difference being that I am by no one’s estimation a bass player. There was one night in high school, when I picked up a gig playing keys with the house band in a swanky hotel for a few months. These guys never took breaks; instead, one musician would leave for fifteen minutes and someone who could double on that instrument would take his place. The bandleader told me in advance that I would be expected to sit in for the acoustic bass player, which gave me time to ask my father, an experienced jazz arranger, what I should do.
“It’s easy,” he replied. “Just wrap your left hand around the top of the neck, deaden the strings and make thumping sounds until the real bassist gets back.”
Rather than ask these incomparable masters of their craft about my dad’s advice, I figured it would be better to plant a few seeds of conversation and let the tape roll.
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Christian, when did you first become aware of Ray Brown?
McBride: I believe the first time I ever had a chance to hear Ray play, I was a freshman in high school, and I was becoming very serious about learning how to play the bass and studying jazz. So I went out and bought two of Ray’s records, This Is Ray Brown, which I believe was your second record, right?
Brown: Hmmm …
McBride: With Oscar Peterson playing organ?
Brown: I don’t remember, but it was early.
McBride: That one, and I bought one of his recent records at the time: The Red-Hot Ray Brown Trio, with [pianist] Gene Harris and [drummer] Mickey Roker, recorded live at the Blue Note. Needless to say, I was floored [laughs].
What was it in Ray’s playing that captured your attention?
McBride: Well,you know, I was only thirteen at the time, so I was becoming more familiar with a lot of legends, like him and Ron Carter and Percy Heath. But Ray always had a very logical way of playing the bass. I’ve always wondered why more people don’t play like him. I mean, when I listen to him play, I say, “Yeah! Exactly [laughs]! That’s the way it’s supposed to be!” I mean, I love people’s individuality, and players have their own thing. But there’s just something about the way Ray plays: the sound, his time, his choice of notes.
Is that how you think of your own playing, Ray?
Brown: Well, I don’t really diagnose my own playing. It’s easier to diagnose somebody else’s than your own. I think we all know what we attempt to do on the instrument, but what actually comes out gets heard out in the audience.
When did you first hear Christian?
Brown: First time I heard him, he and [pianist] Benny Green were doing a duo. I came into this joint late and they played for me, just for me.
Did you know Ray was coming?
McBride: Yeah, we had been forewarned.
Brown: I was impressed with both of them. Benny wound up playing in my band later. If I had been a drummer, Christian would have been in my band [laughs].
Plugging In
Christian, you started on electric bass. Did that affect your approach to playing acoustic?
McBride: No, but only because I was so young. It didn’t bother me any. I think had I waited until I was seventeen or eighteen years old to start playing the acoustic bass after playing the electric bass, I’m sure it would have been more of a psychological wall. But I was so young and naive, I said, “Oh, well, the acoustic bass is nothing but an oversized electric bass, so what’s the big deal?”
Brown: I think it actually helped him, because he does some things on the bass that guys who played bass all their life just wouldn’t think of trying. Because he’s done them on the electric, he just carries it over. He doesn’t know that it can’t be done [laughs].
What kind of impact did the bass guitar have on you, Ray?
Brown: You know, I didn’t start listening to the electric until I started listening to some of the lines that this guy James Jamerson was doing out of Motown. They were pretty slick, you know? I don’t care what instrument you play, you gotta listen to some of that. He was sort of like the Israel Crosby of the electric bass, wouldn’t you say?
McBride: Totally.
Brown: I mean, he wasn’t flashy. But, man, it was just basically perfect. Those Marvin Gaye records, man?
McBride: That’s right.
Brown: He ate it alive. And subtly. He was so funny. When I finally met him, he said, “Hey, Ray Brown! I stole a lot of your stuff!” I said, “Get outta here! I’m stealin’ it back [laughs]!”
Did you play electric much?
Brown: A little bit.
McBride: You played a mess out of it too.
Brown: No, I mean, we had to play it, just to survive. When I was doing studio work around ‘66 back in California, they used to have anywhere from four to ten bass players on every movie call. A whole slew of bass players, right? And slowly, as the years went by, they went from four-to-ten to two-to-six, so the average movie call was four. There would be an electric bass player over there, in another section with the guitarists. Then pretty soon they started saying, “Okay, we got a movie for you. Bring your string and your electric.” They didn’t even ask you if you played electric; they just said, “Bring ‘em both.” In other words, if you don’t have an electric, don’t take the call.
McBride: Right, right.
Brown: So everyone was runnin’ around, getting electrics. The only advantage we had was that we could read music. But it was like this. [Brown mimics holding a bass guitar with the neck straight up, like an acoustic bass, while squinting at an imaginary score.]
McBride: I can’t imagine it was like that for you, though. I mean, among electric bass players, there’s always this running joke: You can tell the guys who are acoustic bass players. They have a way of playing the electric bass that lets you know they never played that before. This must be one of their first times on the electric bass.
Brown: They don’t even know how to hold it.
McBride: Right. They pluck too hard, you know? You hear the pickups clippin’ and stuff, so it sounds really funny. But Walking in Space? The Quincy Jones record? I mean, Ray, talkin’ about Jam3rson, I always like to bring this up too: He did a record with James Brown, called Soul on Top. Not a whole lot of people know about it. He’s playin’ on “It’s a Man’s World” and he’s tearing it to pieces, man.
Brown: I make no claims … [McBride breaks into laughter.] I call all the guys up who made me record on electric bass and say, “Listen, if I give your money back, will you take my name off the record [laughter]?”
When people like Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius began expanding the technique and the language of the bass guitar, did that affect acoustic bassists?
McBride: I don’t think so. I don’t think even a layman who really doesn’t know much about jazz but listens to rock ‘n’ roll or whatever, who doesn’t listen to traditional jazz, I don’t think they would expect to see those kinds of things done on acoustic bass. At least I’ve never experienced that type of thing.
Brown: Well, I want to say something about this. I find there was a link in some areas. When you start using attachments, I think you’ve really separated them.
McBride: The pedals and all that.
Brown: I mean, I’ve done clinics at universities where people say, “Well, what about the electric bass?” And I say, “The electric bass is fine and there’s music to go with that instrument. You forget that if you had heard the bass in the Thirties, it was slapped! It was all slap bass!” The stuff that you hear guys [i.e., bass guitarists] doing now was the same thing they were doing with the bass.
McBride: One thing that’s kind of bothering me, that I’m finding among a lot of young electric bass players now, is that playing slap is almost becoming the norm. If you play what they call finger technique, you’re considered …
Brown: … old time!
McBride: Primitive, you know? “You mean you can’t slap, man?” Well, yeah, I can slap, but I don’t have to do it all the time, do I?”
Brown: That’s where the separation is coming now.
Classrooms vs. Club Gigs
A lot of classic jazz clubs have been closing down in recent years.
Brown: But something takes its place. We talk about all the clubs that used to be, but how many festivals were there fifteen years ago?
McBride: Yeah, right.
Brown: And parties. I know some guys who make a living just playing weekend parties all over, year-round.
Is something lost as well as something gained as classrooms replace the club circuit as the proving ground for jazz?
Brown: Well, I think that is a natural occurrence. You can’t duck that. The further back you go, the bigger the differences are. When I went to school, first of all, there was no music in grade school. The only jazz we had in my grade school was when I played the piano. When everybody was real good, we’d play a little jazz at the end of the class. That was it. No recordings. Nothing. Once a month, when I was a little kid – I’m talking about six, seven years old – they marched us three blocks over to the hall and made us sit down and listen to a symphony rehearsal. Which was fine; there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t know, if Count Basie had been rehearsing in town, if they would have taken us to hear that. It would have been nice if all kids got exposure to everything. They’d make up their minds what kind of music they like and not force-feed them to a point where we don’t have any young people who go to the opera or the symphony or the ballet. I mean, they just don’t go, right? They don’t even consider it. Something is brainwashing them and telling them that it isn’t there.
“No one can teach you how to swing.” — Christian McBride
On the other hand, Christian, is there something missing in the fact that you don’t have the club-centered scene that nurtured jazz artists years ago?
McBride: Well, I think musicians in my generations, we just took what we had. I mean, obviously we weren’t there to see 52nd Street, so we can’t make it be something that we don’t know about. We heard stories about how great 52nd Street was, but we wouldn’t even try to recreate that. So it was like, “Look, we don’t know about this, so we’ll just try to make our own scene and do the best we can with that.”
Does teaching jazz academically somehow run contrary to something in its spirit?
McBride: Well, I have the fortune of being around a lot of musicians who let us know that jazz wasn’t the type of music that you learn solely in the classroom. And that’s true. I mean, if you even just try to play jazz, you can see that learning how to play changes is a very small part of the whole deal. I know a lot of young musicians, they spend so much time in the room just on that, playing changes. No one can teach you how to swing. No one can teach you how to feel. I mean, someone can teach you a concept of composing, but I don’t think anyone can actually teach you how to write a song like “Sophisticated Lady.” They can give you the tools with which to make a song like that, but they can’t teach you.
The Perfect Bass
How do you find a bass that gives you exactly what you need?
Brown: That’s like looking for a wife. You really have to have a lot of separation there. I used to have a bass, which sold about ten years ago for $50,000. And I got it for around $200. One of my favorite bass players used to come around … Now, I thought I had a great bass, but he would pick it up and play a couple of things: “You still playing this truck? He called it a truck! Oscar Pettiford called it a truck because he didn’t speak fast enough for him. But I was into rhythm playing and sound, and he was into soloing. So it’s according to what the guy wants. Everybody has a different concept.
McBride: You pretty much have the same type of thing on one of these instruments, though.
Brown: Well, I think your sound is in your ear. Whatever you pick up, you try to make that sound come out of it.
So you would select a different bass for different types of gigs?
Brown: No, not necessarily.
McBride: Only a few lucky people are able to have more than one acoustic bass.
Brown: Because they’re too hard to play. They’re all different. You run up here and grab a B on that on this bass and it’s a C on the next one.
McBride: Exactly.
Brown: It’s a half-step off. So you don’t jump back and forth like that on instruments. You get one, you learn how to play it, and that’s yours and you play it all the time.
Pianists will tell you, though, that there are big differences between different makes of piano.
Brown: Yeah, but the key is always in the same place [laughs].
…
Dream Gigs
Ray, you have probably the most comprehensive list of credits in jazz. You’ve played with just about every artist out there. Is there anyone you missed?
Brown: I think I’ve played with just about everybody. I didn’t record with everybody. I never recorded with Miles [Davis], although I jammed with Miles a lot. I never recorded with Dexter [Gordon], but I played with him. There may be a half-dozen people that I didn’t record with.
When you play with an artist for the first time, how do you develop a connection with them?
Brown: Well, first of all, what you have to answer is, how do we get together? In other words, let’s say you’re gonna record, and you call Christian McBride to record with you. Why are you calling Christian McBride? Because he plays a certain way and you like the sound he gets. So all he’s got to do is to come in here and do his thing. He doesn’t have to worry about anything else. I mean, that’s why you called him! So you have that to talk about, as opposed to maybe two guys meeting on a gig for the first time, feeling each other out. Would you agree with that?
McBride: Yeah, completely. At some point, you just learn how to play with someone. I really don’t think it’s that big of an issue. … I don’t think it’s that big of a science to learn how to hook up with somebody. You listen to them, you hear what they play and you try to fit in with them. And vice-versa.
If you could go back in time and play with anyone from the past, who would it be?
McBride: Oh, man. I couldn’t answer that. It’s too difficult, way too difficult.
Brown: It’s the same thing as someone asking who’s your favorite person to have played with. You have to be kidding me! I mean, I played with Duke Ellington, who I’ve admired all my life. Count Basie, I used to sit under his piano when I was a kid. Art Tatum, Bird [Charlie Parker] … Can you imagine saying just one person? There must be fifty people he’d love to go back and play with.
Wynton’s “Young Lions”
There’s a lot of controversy over the tendency of many young jazz musicians to look toward the past for their inspiration and musical models, rather than experiment with new forms and move toward the future.
Brown: Well, I don’t know about that. My immediate thoughts are that anybody who says they can play jazz or any kind of music without ever listening to anything that ever went before them …
McBride: … is crazy.
Brown: Yeah, I mean, how did you learn how to talk? You crawled around on the floor, listening to everybody talk. Pretty soon, you start picking up a few words. But to stand up when you turn twenty-one and say, “Yeah, I learned how to talk by myself. Nobody taught me how to talk …”
“When you become a professional, then everything that you do is going to be something new.” – Ray Brown
The issue isn’t about being aware of the past. It’s about being too dependent on the past.
Brown: Look, everybody is going to do what they are going to do. He [gesturing toward McBride] is not gonna stand up and play every note that any other bass player before him had played. You do that when you’re thirteen years old. But when you become a professional, then everything that you do is going to be something new. That’s why he is who he is. I mean, I used to play everything that Oscar Pettiford, Slam Stewart and Jimmy Blanton ever played. I knew every note they played. But I finally came up with my own stuff.
Nobody would question the importance of that stage in an artist’s development.
Brown: All I’m saying is that it’s very difficult to get from here to there without some form of reference. I mean, you’ve got to listen to somebody or something sometime. If they took a baby and just isolated him, and left a piano and a trumpet and a violin in the room, and let him grow up, I don’t know – unless he’s a super-talent – whether he’d be able to play those instruments if he never heard a note of music and never saw anybody play those things for some point of reference: “Oh, you put it under your chin.”
McBride: I’ll tell you a story. I had an interesting talk with Joe Zawinul just a couple of nights ago. We started talking about Wynton Marsalis. … In a nutshell, Joe Zawinul was saying that it’s not so much that the young musicians are trying to copy a lot of the things that happened before. It’s not the musicians causing all this trouble and talk. It’s the people who aren’t musicians who are making up all this crap about “these musicians are copying.” He said, “Now, you take Wynton. This guy has become the pedestal that people who don’t know much about jazz turn to. They say, ‘Okay, he’s the man in jazz, so in order for us to get some information, we have to turn to him.’” And he said, “The musicians didn’t necessarily make him the guru of jazz.” So this is where all the stuff stems from: the people who feel like they need to stir it up some.
Yes, but it’s not just the press. Keith Jarrett has expressed very deep reservations about what Wynton and the “young lions” stand for.
McBride: I understand what Keith is saying, but I think that his feelings are not necessarily caused by his being too concerned with … I think there are a lot of musicians out there who he would think probably are not making a conscious or a subconscious effort to copy or rehash something that’s been done before.
Leaders & Followers
Do you take a different approach to playing when you’re leading the session or when you’re on someone else’s album?
Brown: Well, when I started doing my first record dates, I played everything: cook, bottle washer, head waiter, busboy. I tried to play every conceivable thing that I had in my repertoire. I’ve gotten smarter in my old age. I do less and let everybody play something.
McBride: We get to stretch out on other people’s records sometimes, so I don’t see why it can’t be the same way for us when we’re bandleaders. Really, it’s all about perception. It amazes me, even to this day, that people ask questions like, “Isn’t it strange to be a bandleader, since you’re a bass player?”
Brown: Or they’ll come up to a bass player who’s a leader and say, “You know, how does it feel to be the leader of a piano trio?”
McBride: Uh-oh [laughs].
Brown: I just wasted one guy. [In a withering tone] “This is a bass trio, my friend.
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L.A. Four.
Christian McBride is such a cool cat. I used to listen to his radio show where he'd interview jazz greats, and he has such an effusive respect for them and a seemingly humble assessment of himself.