Christian McBride

One of the hottest jazz acts going right now arose from a musician's basic need -- to play New York's Village Vanguard.

Bassist Christian McBride was hanging out at the fabled jazz club a couple of years back when he realized it had been about 10 years since he'd brought one of his own bands onstage.

"And that's a no-no for a jazz musician," McBride said. "Every self-respecting jazz musician ... has to play the Vanguard. That's like Mecca, you know what I mean?"

He approached club owner Lorraine Gordon, who said she'd love to have him back, but he would have to bring a traditional Vanguard act -- no electric band, no fusion.

McBride, who had been recording and leading a few experimental electric outfits over the past few years, would need to bring in an acoustic, straight-ahead band. He quickly put it together, and Inside Straight was born.

"And the week [at the club] turned out to be so successful, business-wise and artistically, everyone involved thought, we've got to figure out a way to keep this together," said McBride, who brings the bop- and soul/jazz-influenced unit to Jefferson Center on Sunday night.

'The swingingest cats'

Still, it took about a year to make the band happen. McBride's lineup -- Steve Wilson (saxophones), Warren Wolf Jr. (vibraphone), Eric Reed (piano) and Carl Allen (drums) -- is a pack of monsters, "the swingingest cats" McBride knows.

"And at the time I thought that would be impossible, because ... everybody's so busy with their own projects," McBride said in a phone interview from his northern New Jersey home. "I never dreamed of having this be a working unit. ... But it finally happened and we recorded. And we've been touring pretty much nonstop since June."

The band's record, "Kind of Brown" (Mack Avenue Records), features McBride compositions loaded with diverse grooves and catchy, complex-yet-accessible melodies. Only "Theme for Kareem," by the late Freddie Hubbard, is not a McBride original. And Wolf, a new player on the scene and a former student of McBride's, is a revelation on vibes, with power, chops and subtlety.

"He's such an incredible musician -- one of the best musicians I've ever met," McBride said.

For touring, Inside Straight has Peter Martin on piano ("he studies a song's DNA and plays it," McBride wrote on his blog) and drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. ("one of the next major cats," McBride predicts). But on the road, musicianship is not always enough.

"What I love most about being on the road is when I can play with musicians who are great people, as well as musicians," McBride said.

"I've been on the road with some musicians who are not that fun to be around. You know, the music is great, when you get onstage, but when you come off the stage and just kind of go your own separate way. You go in your hotel room and bang your head up against the wall and think, 'oh, what a drag,' until you get to the stage."

This is not that kind of band. Young guys Owens and Wolf are wide-eyed, but even the old pros Wilson and Martin are fun to be around, McBride said.

"That's what I love most," he said. "I don't even need to say how great they are musically -- you can just hear that. But it's the personal thing that means the most to me, when I'm on the road with certain guys."

All in the family

McBride, 39, started his touring career doing gigs with trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Freddie Hubbard. Since then, McBride has proved himself one of the most talented and versatile bassists on the planet, able to move seamlessly from one genre to another.

Gigs with McCoy Tyner, Sting, Questlove, James Brown, Public Enemy and Pat Metheny are part of his resume. McBride played Jefferson Center with Metheny in November 2005. A decade ago, he led his own band on a stop at Roanoke College.

Recently, he's been part of the jazz/fusion supergroup Five Peace Band, featuring guitarist John McLaughlin and keyboardist Chick Corea.

Those jobs are just a sliver of McBride's past 20 years. He left The Juilliard School in New York after one year to hit the road with Hargrove. But he was clearly ready, thanks to his father, Lee Smith, and great uncle Howard Cooper, both bass players on the Philadelphia music scene. McBride has been playing since he was 9.

His father, an electric bassist, was his first inspiration, but his upright bass-playing uncle taught him about jazz.

"So it was such a great team ... especially my great uncle, because he was the one who ... once a month would bring me a new stack of albums to listen to -- [Charles] Mingus, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers, Percy Heath, Charlie Haden," McBride said. "He really schooled me to the great legends of jazz."

In junior high school, McBride took to upright acoustic bass, a difficult instrument to master. Not only is it huge, but it has no frets, making intonation a concern.

"When you're 11 years old, there's a certain naivete that comes in that helps you, I think, because at that age I wasn't aware that it was supposed to be a hard instrument," he said.

"I just looked at it as an oversized electric bass. That kid logic can really be amazing sometimes."