EVELYN FREJA
Christian McBride will make appearances with The New Jersey Symphony at concerts in Newark and Red Bank.
Bassist and composer Christian McBride will show two different sides of his artistry with New Jersey Symphony next week: A concerto written for him by his late friend and mentor, and an orchestral jazz work of his own that he revisited and reimagined. The pieces will showcase his versatility as a performer and composer, as well as his ability to bridge jazz and classical music.
The Montclair-based jazz legend will be the guest soloist and Eric Jacobsen will conduct in a program titled “Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances,” Nov. 19 and 22 at NJPAC in Newark — as part of the TD James Moody Jazz Festival — as well as Nov. 21at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank.
Two popular symphonic works, Rachmaninoff’s title piece and Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, will be paired with two orchestral jazz works featuring McBride. He will be the soloist in George Duke’s Dark Wood: Bass Concerto for Christian McBride, making its East Coast premiere. He will also play double bass in the rhythm section of his own Fried Bacon, a New Jersey Symphony commission featuring an improvised jazz horn solo by principal horn Chris Komer.
CHRIS KOMER
For Komer, the prospect of improvising over McBride’s bass lines is both thrilling and unnerving.
“It’s going to be very daunting to have Christian McBride in the rhythm section,” he says. “He’s probably the most in-demand jazz bass player on earth and a true legend. To have him accompany me while I’m improvising … it’s going to be kind of a head trip! Those are the kind of moments where you’re like, ‘Pinch me — is this really happening?’ ”
Fried Bacon was McBride’s first orchestral jazz composition; he primarily writes for big band. Komer came up with the idea for the project and invited McBride to write one of the four movements to Surreal Sketches for Horn, Jazz Trio and Orchestra, which premiered at the Symphony’s 2021-22 season finale, “An American Rhapsody,” in June 2022.
The project began taking shape in 2017 when Komer won the principal horn position. “The person helping me negotiate my contract said, ‘You should negotiate a jazz horn concerto that they commission,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘That’s a good idea; let’s see if they’ll go for that.’ But I wasn’t sure how they would react. Stuff like that can be a huge faceplant if it’s not done well, but they knew enough about my playing and my jazz background that they were willing to take a chance.”
Part of the arrangement was that Komer could choose the composers, as well as the rhythm section — piano, bass and drums — that would join him onstage. He commissioned movements from McBride, Paquito D’Rivera, Vivian Li and Gary Morgan; he describes the last two as “very close friends who I had worked with on various jazz projects.”
Salvador Dalí’s “Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon.”
To tie the movements together, Komer asked each composer to choose a Salvador Dalí painting as inspiration; the Spanish surrealist is one of Komer’s favorite artists. McBride chose Dalí’s 1941 “Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon,” which gave the movement its unusual title.
Komer thought the choice was hilarious. Although he did not know McBride personally, he was familiar with his work and his strong ties to NJPAC. “I knew he had gone to Juilliard for classical bass, and my hunch was that he had never written for orchestra, even though he has his own big band and composes quite a bit,” Komer says. “I was correct: He had never written for orchestra, and that’s how we were able to pique his interest. We said, ‘Hey, we’re going to commission you to write a short movement for full orchestra and an improvising French horn player.’ He loved the idea and was on board.”
McBride remembers the phone call.
“Chris got in touch with me and told me about the concept: that he was commissioning four musicians to write a short piece for French horn and orchestra, and I was one of them,” he says. “I was excited! I said, ‘Well, I’ve never really written for a full symphony before. What do you want?’ And Chris said, ‘Look, I’m a big fan of your big band writing, but just because this is for symphony orchestra, don’t think I don’t want some swing in it!’ Plus there was a rhythm section. So that’s what I did.”
Komer describes McBride’s contribution as “very down home and swinging, kind of like going to church on Sunday, down South. It’s a lot of fun and a very joyful movement.”
Before the commission came about, McBride had thought about crossing musical genres and adding his own voice to the orchestral jazz repertoire. “In your brain, you always say yes,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh man, I would really love to write for orchestra.’ But then when you get the call, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is really happening now — I’d better buckle down and do this.’ Sometimes you’ve got to be careful what you wish for because you’ll get it, and then you have to produce!”
Four years later, when the Symphony told him they wanted to perform Fried Bacon again, McBride saw an opportunity to revisit the work. “When I hear that piece now — how it was played in 2022 — it sounds exactly like what it is: A first-timer writing a piece for an orchestra,” he says. “It’s a nice piece but it’s a starting point, so I wanted to go back and tweak a couple things, and hopefully make it more interesting for Chris and the orchestra.”
Komer has evolved as an artist, too. In 2022, he improvised in the concerto’s three other movements, but for Fried Bacon, he performed a free, improvised cadenza before the movement began. He wanted the movement itself to give greater prominence to the bassist and pianist, since the work was billed as a concerto for horn, jazz trio and orchestra.
“This time, I’m actually going to improvise during the movement, so I’ve been working hard on that, and I feel like I’ve progressed as an improviser,” he says. “My improv has come a long way in four years, just from being out there and playing jazz gigs and feeling more confident.”
EVELYN FREJA
CHRISTIAN McBRIDE
The rhythm section has changed as well. In 2022, it included Diallo House on bass, Manuel Valera on piano and Ismail Lawal on drums. Valera and Lawal will return, with McBride taking over on bass. The trio will also perform in the Duke concerto, which puts McBride in the role of soloist.
Dark Wood makes considerable demands on its soloist, requiring him to switch between three bass instruments. “George said, ‘Hey, I’m writing this piece for you and I want you to play all of your basses — the fret electric bass, the fretless electric bass and the acoustic bass, both pizzicato and arco,’ ” McBride says. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this sounds like a lot.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it is a lot. But if anyone can do it, you can do it.’ ”
The work grew out of a deep friendship. McBride and Duke met in the early 1990s and, by 2002, McBride had joined The George Duke Band. “George was like a second dad to me,” says McBride. “I carry him with me every day. He was a mentor to me, as a producer and an arranger, and as a businessperson he was always on it.”
A couple of years before Duke died in 2013, he became the first artistic director of The Symphonic Jazz Orchestra in Los Angeles, which is led by music director Mitch Glickman and commissions orchestral jazz from composers across the country. “If you have music that works for a symphony orchestra and rhythm section, they will play it,” McBride says.
One of Duke’s first assignments was to write a piece for the orchestra, and he chose to create the 22-minute bass concerto for McBride. “Imagine how flattered I was to hear that he wanted to write a bass concerto for me,” McBride says. “I was like, ‘George, one of your best friends in the world is Stanley Clarke. Why are you writing it for me and not for him?’ But George was so beautiful, and I am so, so incredibly grateful and thankful that we get to play this piece on the East Coast.”
McBride says he wants to give audiences a sense of the broad scope of Duke’s musical gifts. “He produced some hit records — you know, he had some dance hits in the ’70s and ’80s — but this man was deep. He could do everything. He could write for orchestras, produce dance tracks and play jazz and classical. The man was a chameleon.”
GEORGE DUKE, 1946-2013
Few musicians can say that a work of art was created in their honor. Asked whether the emotion of that might overtake him during the performance, McBride says, “Oh yeah, absolutely. But fortunately, there are some passages in the piece that are so challenging so I’m not going to have time to get emotional. I’m going to have to worry about nailing the part. So I’m glad George put that in there.”
McBride’s involvement with NJPAC extends well beyond the concert stage. He has served as NJPAC’s jazz advisor since 2012 and is the artistic advisor of the Moody festival. He credits John Schreiber, who has served as NJPAC’s president and CEO for 15 years (and will step down in July), with helping to establish jazz as a major presence at the center.
“John has been such a great leader and also he comes from the jazz world,” McBride says. Schreiber was the right-hand man of George Wein, the late founder of The Newport Jazz Festival, for many years.
McBride and Schreiber’s friendship dates back almost 40 years to when Schreiber came to Philadelphia while working for Wein. McBride, born and raised in Philadelphia, was a 15-year-old high school student already playing bass at a remarkably high level. “John seemed to take some interest in me, even back then,” McBride says. “He was like, ‘Man, I don’t know who this kid is on bass, but he’s good!’ And he’s pretty much followed my career since then.”
They often crossed paths after McBride moved to New York to study at Juilliard, meeting at The Newport Jazz Festival and The JVC Jazz Festival. “When John took over NJPAC in 2011, he got in touch with me and said, ‘Hey, it’s really important for me to have jazz here at NJPAC,’ ” McBride says. “Between himself, me and David Rodriguez (NJPAC’s executive vice president and executive producer), I think he had a grade-A team of jazz lovers and jazz advocates.”
Christian McBride, teaching jazz.
Together, they built the Festival and the TD Jazz for Teens program and brought in major figures in jazz, including the late Geri Allen, the Montclair native who served as program director of the center’s All-Female Jazz Residency. “You can’t complain about what you see out in the world without doing something about it, and I think John has always done something about it,” McBride says. “He never laments, like, ‘Oh, jazz is not popular with the young kids’ or ‘Oh, these kids don’t understand how great jazz is.’ He instituted the jazz program so he doesn’t have to complain about that!”
Notable alumni of TD Jazz for Teens include drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who was in its inaugural class, and Savannah Harris, who plays drums in one of McBride’s bands, Ursa Major.
A counterpart to NJPAC’s jazz education efforts is Jazz House Kids, the Montclair-based jazz school that McBride co-founded with his wife, vocalist Melissa Walker, who serves as its president. McBride is the organization’s artistic director.
“Between NJPAC and Jazz House Kids, there have been at least two generations of musicians who have come through either one or both of those programs who are carrying the flag for jazz right now,” he says. “You get people like Sorey and Harris, Emmet Cohen and Immanuel Wilkins. It’s been incredible to see these young musicians start off as teens, and now they’re out there, getting paid more money than me!”
McBride also teaches master classes at NJPAC and mentors countless young musicians. Ursa Major, a quintet featuring him and emerging jazz musicians, recently released its debut studio album, Points of Light.
“The feedback has been really, really good,” he says. “I’m really happy because I love the musicians in Ursa Major so much. They are significantly younger than me, but I’m flabbergasted by everything they do musically.”
EVELYN FREJA/MACK AVENUE
Ursa Major (clockwise from top left, Savannah Harris, Christian McBride, Nicole Glover, Ely Perlman and Mike King).
The Mack Avenue Records label called McBride a couple of weeks ago to report that the album had already received 36 percent more preorders than the Christian McBride Big Band release, Without Further Ado, Vol. 1, from August 2025. That album won a 2026 Grammy, which was his 11th.
McBride’s Symphony debut can be traced in large part to Komer, who built a career between the orchestral and jazz worlds. He grew up in Kansas in a musical family and began studying piano. He played trumpet in junior high jazz band and trombone in high school, in addition to the horn. “There was no one playing the French horn and the instrument intrigued me,” he says. “I liked the sound of it.”
He studied jazz piano at Wichita State University and The Cleveland Institute of Music. At The Manhattan School of Music, he planned to double major in jazz piano and classical horn, but recognized an opportunity to distinguish himself. “There were about 1,000 great jazz pianists in New York City and only about half a dozen jazz horn players,” he says. “I wasn’t thrilled with any of their playing, and I decided that I was going to work on that aspect for jazz and find a niche.”
He is now one of the few jazz hornists in New York who improvises and performs regularly. He recently played at Ornithology Jazz Club in Brooklyn on the same day as the final concert of the Symphony’s opening weekend. After performing in a matinee at The State Theatre in New Brunswick, he drove to Brooklyn — in Sunday traffic.
“It was really fun, though, and I played with some of my all-time favorite jazz musicians in New York,” he says. “The pay is not great but jazz musicians are not in it to get rich. We do it because we love it and we have an appreciative audience, and we’re playing with guys who we want to play with.”
On the orchestral side, Komer calls his position with the Symphony “a dream job.” His path to principal horn was not a straight line. He first joined the orchestra as third horn, from 1990 to 1994, then left for a decade, working with groups including The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and in Broadway shows.
He reauditioned in 2004, and Neeme Järvi hired him as third horn, the same position he had previously held. When the principal horn retired in 2017, Komer moved up. He was Xian Zhang’s first hire after she became music director in 2016.
Komer also teaches horn at Princeton University, performs with several other orchestras, and tours with the Jamie Baum Septet+ jazz ensemble. He spends his free time in the Montana mountains at The Artists’ Refuge at Thunderhead, a retreat he founded in 2007. It operates primarily in the summer, but he hopes to make it a year-round destination with a full symphony and festival season.
His main instrument is a triple horn — a combination of three horns in one, handmade in Germany by Engelbert Schmid. “I can do everything on that horn,” he says. “It has the horn side, the B-flat side and then I have a high E-flat horn on it, which makes the high range more secure.”
In his four-member section, each player uses a different type of horn, “but somehow we get a good blend of sound,” he says. “The orchestra sounds as good as it has in all the years I have played with them. There’s this trust level that is through the roof; everyone trusts everyone’s playing and sense of rhythm, and that just builds confidence.”
New Jersey Symphony will present “Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances” concerts, featuring Christian McBride, Nov. 19 at 1:30 p.m. and Nov. 22 at 2 p.m. at NJPAC in Newark, and Nov. 21 at 7:30 p.m. at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank. Visit njsymphony.org.
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