McBride, Hunter, and Parker: Live at the R-Bar

Virtuoso bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, just 26, has an abiding love of funk and has been mixing more of it into his albums and shows. It's not just the music that McBride loves but the show-biz style of the great soul acts: he takes the stage last, after a warm-up by his band, and he likes to entertain the crowd with James Brown dance steps.

At the Regattabar a week ago Thursday (where his quartet was playing a weekend of double features with the Charlie Hunter/Leon Parker Duo), McBride's take on Sly Stone's "Family Affair" (from which his latest Verve album gets its name) was a wide-open structure for medium-uptempo jazz improvisation. Here he stuck to acoustic bass, where he has as much fluidity and imagination as any player on the scene, his lines flowing effortlessly from melodic lyricism to dense phrases of percussive jazz abstraction. "Family Affair" was also a good showcase for his formidable tenor-saxophonist of the past few years, Tim Warfield, who shows compositional skill in building his note-heavy solos to satisfying climaxes, and for pianist Shadrick Mitchell, who was equally adept at shaping the flow of his lines into a meaningful narrative.

McBride's "lead" fretless electric bass on Stevie Wonder's "Summer Soft" was technically flashy, but it wasn't Stevie. On the original "Brown Funk," at least McBride's heavy thumb slapping worked with drummer Rodney Jones's backbeat to support Warfield's thick layered soul cries.

Eight-string electric-guitarist Hunter -- with his array of subtle effects, self-accompanied bass lines, organ tones, and simple riff-like tunes -- suggested classic organ/guitar jazz match-ups. His bass string combined with Parker's bass drum to create elemental grooves that seemed rooted to the center of the earth. Parker, for his part, is a radical minimalist who works an infinite variety of color, dynamics, and rhythmic shapes on those grooves. In several tunes, Hunter was happy to follow Parker's lead, which resulted in a giggle-inducing handclap-and-hambone duet. At one point, Parker went from bare-handed slaps on the drum skins to his thighs to pounding his own chest with his fists, without dropping a beat.

Hunter's conception may be blues and riff-based, but he prefers glittering harmonic mosaics to propulsive linear drive. His intro to Parker's "Belief" sounded like a pearly meditation on the chords and melody of "Love for Sale." He and Parker coupled Billy Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge" with Brian Wilson's "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)." They made the pairing sound inevitable. These two (their album is due from Blue Note in March) are intent on creating their own space, telling their own story.

-- Jon Garelick