The Movement Revisited with Christian McBride

Bassist extraordinaire, composer, arranger, educator, curator and administrator, Christian McBride, has been one of the most important and most omnipresent figures in the jazz world for 20 years.

McBride is currently the host and producer of “The Lowdown: Conversations With Christian” on SiriusXM satellite radio and NPR’s “Jazz Night in America,” a weekly radio show and multimedia collaboration between WBGO, NPR and Jazz at Lincoln Center, showcasing outstanding live jazz from across the country.

He is also a respected educator and advocate, In 1998 he combined those roles, composing "The Movement, Revisited," a four-movement suite dedicated to four of the major figures of the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The piece was commissioned by the Portland (ME) Arts Society and the National Endowment for the Arts, and performed throughout New England in the fall of 1998.  The piece was performed throughout the New England states in the fall of 1998 with McBride's quartet and a 30-piece gospel choir led by J.D. Steele.

For its tenth anniversary, "The Movement, Revisited" was expanded, rewritten, and revamped to feature an 18-piece big band and four actors/speakers in addition to the gospel choir. It was performed at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, on the campus of the University of Illinois, in May of 2022.

Since 2000, McBride has blazed a trail as a bandleader with the Christian McBride Band. McBride's fellow bandmates – saxophonist Ron Blake, keyboardist Geoffrey Keezer, and drummer Terreon Gully – have sympathetically shared McBride's all-inclusive, forward-thinking outlook on music. Releasing two CD's – 2002′s Vertical Vision, and 2006′s Live at Tonic, writer Alan Leeds called McBride's band (affectionately known as the "CMB") "one of the most intoxicating, least predictable bands on the scene today." It is a group that has mesmerizingly walked an electro-acoustic fault line with amazing results.