| Jazz |
Christopher McBride electrifies bebop with a modern urgency.
Christopher McBride doesn’t just play bebop; he supercharges it. His new album arrives on October 3 with the force of a revelation, a record that manages to honor the intricacies of tradition while bursting with the urgency of the present. Recorded in just three days, the thirteen tracks feel at once spontaneous and deliberate, a balancing act that only a musician of McBride’s discipline could achieve.
McBride’s band, The Whole Proof, is no sideline project. Formed in Chicago more than a decade ago and reconstituted in New York after his move in 2013, the group has become his primary vehicle for storytelling through music. Storytelling, in fact, is the project’s central mission. Every composition is designed to carry emotion, to illuminate a moment, or to draw the listener into a world McBride has lived himself. That sense of purpose gives this album its gravity.
The music brims with restless energy. Ten original pieces and two reimagined covers chart a course through a soundscape that often feels like walking through a city: moods shift suddenly, grooves emerge and vanish, the tempo of life itself dictating the pace. The rhythm section deserves particular credit for sustaining that propulsion without ever becoming mechanical. They lock into McBride’s writing with a groove that’s both precise and uncontainable.
But what elevates the record is its intimacy. McBride has said that each original composition was inspired by a person, a place, or a moment in his life, and you can hear that in the phrasing. He plays the saxophone like a diarist, transcribing lived experience into notes and silences. The title track, inspired by a conversation with saxophonist Jason Marshall, meditates on the way professional and personal paths converge, diverge, and sometimes reconnect. In McBride’s hands, those reflections become not abstract philosophy but music you can feel in your chest.
The album also carries a political undercurrent, one McBride doesn’t attempt to disguise. After visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he was struck by a passage describing the transatlantic slave trade: enslaved people who survived the crossing, it noted, were expected to endure only seven years before their bodies gave out under the violence of forced labor. The next day, McBride wrote a piece in response. It is one of the album’s most arresting moments, less mournful than insistent, a reminder that jazz has always functioned as both testimony and resistance.
What lingers most, though, is McBride’s ability to blur time. He is a composer rooted in bebop, but he refuses to treat it as an archive. His music feels alive, present tense. He writes with the fire of history but plays with the drive of someone pushing forward, eager to test what bebop might still become.
By the end of the record, it is hard to deny McBride’s stature. He is not only an exceptional saxophonist but one of the most compelling American composers working today. His album is proof that bebop can still surprise, still thrill, still matter. And if the recordings weren’t enough, McBride is taking this work on the road, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, where the urgency of these songs will almost certainly hit with even greater force.
Christopher McBride has made a statement: bebop is not just alive, it’s wide awake.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 30th 2025
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The Hang, The Hustle, The Path Album Release Party – Jazz Showcase Chicago
Thursday, October 2, 2025 (8:00 PM)
Sunday, October 5, 2025 (9:00 PM)
Jazz Showcase 806 South Plymouth Court Chicago, IL 60605 United States (map)
Musicians:
Jon Thomas (piano, claviers et orgue)
Barry Stephenson (contrebasse acoustique et électrique)
Michael Piolet (batterie
Guests: les trompettistes Josh Evans et Wayne Tucker, le guitariste Marcus Machado et les chanteurs Charles Turner et J. Hoard
Track Listing :
Welcome (#AllDay)
Opportunity Lost Feat. Josh Evans
CHI To NY Feat. Wayne Tucker
Punta Cana
A Downpour Of Beauty (Ceta’s Song) Feat. Charles Turner & Marcus Machado
Funky Good Señor Blues Feat. Josh Evans
You Are My Joy
Seven (The Human Cost) Feat. Josh Evans
Saxophone At Night
Jeanette Feat. Wayne Tucker
Kiss Of Life Feat. J. Hoard
The #BAM Continuum Feat. DJ Skaz Digga
The Hang, The Hustle, The Path