Christian McBride and New Jawn
‘Prime’ (Mack Avenue Records)
At Dizzy’s Through April 9

The term “New Jawn” derives from Philadelphia street slang. I couldn’t tell you what it means, only that it’s in the title of an outstanding ensemble led by Philly’s no. 1 bass-playing, bandleading, music-composing son, Christian McBride. He introduced the band with the self-titled “New Jawn” album in 2018, and their second album, “Prime,” is being launched this weekend with a run at Dizzy’s.

We tend to think of the City of Brotherly Love as being a center of soul music — and, with it, soul-inflected jazz, vis-à-vis Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, and all those other soulful jazz organists. Perhaps it makes sense that Mr. McBride and his New Jawn quartet have perfected a kind of free jazz with a heavily soul-infused edge. Or is it the other way around?  

From the first note of their opening set, it was clear that they weren’t playing the customary chord-driven bebop that we usually hear at Dizzy’s. This was what jazz fans and critics started to call “outside” playing 60 years ago, meaning that it was not based on long improvisations built on cycles of chords. The man generally acknowledged as the innovator and greatest practitioner of this approach, Ornette Coleman, consistently described this as playing off the (melodic) line rather than the harmonies.

For a time, free jazz got free-er and free-er, and many players abandoned the idea of a regular beat and in some cases traditional intonation as well.  Yet there have been contemporary players, like a brilliant tenor saxophonist, JD Allen, who remind us that these terms are fairly arbitrary: that playing “off the line” isn’t necessarily any more outside or inside than playing off the chord changes.

Christian McBride and New Jawn make this point brilliantly as well — in fact, this is just about the most soulful, cleanest, and most user-friendly free jazz I’ve ever heard. Indeed, this is free jazz that feels perfectly at home in a Midtown, mainstream venue like Jazz at Lincoln Center, and needn’t be banished to those lofts where the avant garde faithful congregated in the 1970s. The quartet is the same as five years ago, with trumpeter Josh Evans, tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and drummer Nasheet Waits in addition to Mr. McBride. 

The early set on Thursday was a combination of tunes from both albums.  The quartet opened with Mr. Evans’s “Pier One Import” followed by “Obsequious” by Larry Young. Both tunes were uptempo — fast and then even faster.  The lack of a traditional chordal instrument, like a keyboard or a guitar, underscored the postmodern feeling, even while the music was highly melodic, rhythmic, and even catchy. You weren’t thinking about either chords or lines when they played, but rather, all the solos seemed to be based on short phrases and brief patterns. The two horns, especially, would play these brief cells of melody, one after the other, gradually weaving the patterns into larger, more cohesive statements. 

Mr. McBride slowed the tempo way down with Mr. Evans’s original, “Ballad of Ernie Washington.” The title was inspired by an anecdote out of jazz lore about how Thelonious Monk was compelled to work under the pseudonym of Ernie (or “Earn E”) Washington because of legal machinations. (The composer’s son, T. S. Monk, tells the tale, but Monk’s biographer, Robin Kelley, suggests otherwise.)  

Whatever the title, it’s a lovely ballad; when Mr. Evans played it, one heard echoes of “I Remember Clifford,” but when Mr. Strickland soloed, now on bass clarinet, I kept hearing “’Round Midnight.” The combination of trumpet and bass clarinet brought to mind the team of Booker Little and Eric Dolphy in the early ’60s, while Mr. Strickland’s “Seek the Source” suggested a blues by Ornette Coleman, such as “Ramblin’.”

The new album includes two non-originals that complement each other in a thoughtful way.  Sonny Rollins’s 1966 “East Broadway Rundown” shows what that great veteran tenor saxophonist learned from Ornette, when he went through a “free” phase with a pianoless quartet. Conversely, Coleman’s “The Good Life,” most famously heard on his 1986 collaboration with Pat Metheny, is very much a Sonny Rollins style calypso.

This was one of the few times when my major complaint was that the set was too short; still, we had roughly 65 minutes of genuinely exciting contemporary jazz. I still couldn’t tell you what the quartet’s title actually means, only that the New Jawn is anything but an old yawn.