Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Jimmy Macbride is among the 25 artists DownBeat thinks will help shape jazz in the decades to come.
(Photo: Yuki Tei)Considering the environment in which he was raised, it’s not terribly surprising that Jimmy Macbride was creating rhythms as early as age 3. His mother, a visual artist, and his father, who was a composer, noticed the precocious child’s interests. “When I was very young, I started playing on some pots and pans at home,” Macbride said via videoconference. “My parents recognized, ‘Hey, I think Jimmy has some interest in percussion. So, maybe we can find a teacher for him.’”
They did find an instructor for the toddler, setting him on a path that would lead to a degree from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Carl Allen, Kenny Washington and other jazz titans. Nowadays, Macbride is an in-demand collaborator.
“When someone calls me for who I am as an artist, that is certainly the greatest compliment,” Macbride said. “When I look at the musicians that I admire and I aspire to be like, that’s the common thread: They can seemingly be in any kind of situation or any musical kind of group, and still, you always know that it’s them. They always sound like themselves.”
Macbride’s versatility is illustrated by his discography of more than 40 titles, including recent recordings by trombonist Nick Finzer, guitarists Nir Felder and Alex Goodman, pianists Eldar Djangirov and Manuel Valera, and saxophonists Roxy Coss and Troy Roberts.
Although he has not recorded a leader date yet, Macbride played a couple of 2019 shows at Smalls in New York, focusing on his own compositions. For the Dec. 4 show, he assembled a quartet with tenor saxophonist Ron Blake, pianist Shai Maestro and bassist Joshua Crumbly.
“It was great to see how everyone’s different personalities contributed to something that was mine—that I had conceived of,” Macbride said. “It was very exciting and rewarding.”
Many bandleaders who have hired Macbride could say the same thing. DB
This story originally was published in the November 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
Dec 3, 2024 12:52 PM
Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Dec 12, 2024 1:58 AM
Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
