McBee, Bassist, Traces His Roots

Renowned jazz bassist Cecil McBee spoke about his creative and personal history during an informal conversation moderated by Director of Bands at Harvard Thomas G. Everett at the New College Theatre last Friday.

McBee, a faculty member at the New England Conservatory, is admired for broadening the musical possibilities of the string bass and in particular for transforming the string bass from the rhythmic backbone to a fully expressive instrument in a band.

“You don’t choose the instrument, it chooses you,” McBee said, when asked how he became one of the most innovative jazz bassists associated with post-hop—a genre that relies heavily on improvisation and to which he has profoundly contributed.

The intimate talk included snippets of McBee’s compositions, which were played for the audience in order to showcase specific musical innovations in McBee’s work.

McBee has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists, such as Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane and Benny Goodman, and is himself a serious composer.

McBee told of how he began his musical career by playing the clarinet in high school. Stepping over a dusty, old instrument in order to store his clarinet one day, he suddenly noticed what was in his way—a string bass.

“For years I’ve been reaching over it, and didn’t know,” McBee said, “so I picked it up and tried to play.”

His bass skills improved rapidly, and he soon began to perform in the local scene in his hometown Tulsa, where there was a demand for bass players.

McBee recounted how, growing up in a segregated society, the night music scene seemed to cross racial boundaries: white cowboys on Cainsville, MI’s bar music scene “showed [him] how to play rhythm changes,” taking him up to “the next level from the Blues.”

Another source of inspiration came from McBee’s grandmother, a devout Christian, who “got the Spirit” during church services one day and grabbed hold of McBee’s arm.

“And I felt the touch of God,” McBee said, adding that he often felt gripped by the same creative spark when playing his music.

When asked whether he was aware of innovating the way that string bass was played in the sixties, McBee pointed to Slug’s in New York City, a thriving jazz club in the East Village, as a venue where he was able to develop his musical style.

“We were doing something that was very, very different [and] people were listening seriously,” he said.