Betting on an Ace of Bass : Christian McBride is being marketed as the best new player to come along in 25 years, but he’d rather let his music speak for him.

‘The next great bassist.” It’s the kind of overcooked superlative that can strike fear in the heart of a fainthearted player, no matter how lofty the level of his talent.

But Christian McBride, the 22-year-old who is being described precisely that way, and who is almost universally viewed as the heir apparent to such hallowed names as Jimmy Blanton, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers and Ron Carter, takes the praise in stride. Faintheartedness is not his style. Remarkably mature for his age, he displays the quiet confidence and gentle modesty of an artist who is very sure of his skills.

Ask McBride about another phrase that has become increasingly attached to his name and he has a more bemused reaction.

“Marketable commodity?” he replies. “I’ve never much thought of myself as a marketable commodity.”

But “marketable commodity” is exactly what the heralded new jazz star has become. Since arriving in New York City from Philadelphia in 1989 to enroll at Juilliard, McBride has performed with everyone from Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis and Joshua Redman to Betty Carter and McCoy Tyner. His big, round, furry bass sound can be heard on nearly 80 albums and counting.

“I’ve been blessed to work with Christian,” Redman says. “If genius exists, he definitely has it.”

Both “marketability” and “genius” will play important roles in McBride’s decision to step forward as a leader in his own right, a challenge that reaches far beyond his well-established role as everyone’s favorite sideman. His debut album as a leader, “Gettin’ to It,” the initial step in a long-anticipated move toward a solo career, was released last week.

It’s not the sort of event that usually arouses significant ripples on the surface of the jazz community. For all their value in the rhythm section, bass players--with a few notable exceptions such as Carter, Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius--have not been conspicuously prominent as candidates for headline attention. Saxophonist, pianists, trumpeters, yes. But bassists are more commonly relegated to the back of the bandstand.

In this case, it was difficult not to take notice. Verve Records, one of the three or four major-label companies in the jazz market, clearly has ambitious plans for McBride, and a significant, well-budgeted game plan has been created for the furtherance of his career.

“We’re very strongly committed to breaking him as an important act,” explains Verve vice president of A&R; Richard Seidel. “We have an extensive marketing, touring and publicity campaigns in place, and so far we’ve met with extraordinary responses.”

A single featuring McBride soloing on “Deck the Halls” became the label’s Christmas card, a five-track sampler of the bassist’s original compositions was serviced to distributors and retail outlets, an electronic press kit followed, as well as a large number of in-store displays, stickers, etc., and a world tour in support of the album begins in March. (He will appear at Catalina Bar & Grill with his quartet the last week in March.)

If there is a jazz bassist who has received similar treatment from a record company the name does not come readily to mind.

“We know we’ve got something special,” adds Seidel. “We really feel that Christian is the first major talent to emerge on the bass in the last 25 years.”

Seidel’s statement is all the more striking when one recalls that the last 25 years have seen the arrival of such influential bassists as Clarke, Pastorius, Charnett Moffett, Charles Fambrough and Robert Hurst, to name only a few.

Interestingly, while Clarke and Pastorius laid down the law on the electric bass, the others have concentrated primarily on the unwieldy but emotionally more expansive acoustic instrument, and McBride’s growing influence may well return its dark, sonorous timbres to the rhythm section eminence they held before the rock era.

“I think a lot of bass players are giving more attention to fundamentals,” he says. “Too many guys, especially after the ‘60s, became too dependent upon playing with amplifiers. They became part of the bass, which really is no good. Because if you’re not producing a good basic sound on the bass on your own, an amplifier’s not going to do it for you.”

How does McBride feel about the expectations that have been placed upon him?

“It’s no problem,” he says, somewhat hesitantly, his resonant baritone not quite disguising his youthful, almost ingenuous mixture of thoughtful pondering and lighthearted assuredness. “I realize what the pressures are, and I try not to think about them too much. But I knew it was time to make my own album, so I tried to find a company that would let me do it my own way.”

Given McBride’s high visibility and sterling musical reputation, there were plenty of companies from which to choose. McBride had several deal points to consider when he made his decision.

Some of the offers didn’t come close.

“One label kept trying to get me to play electric bass, which I didn’t want to do,” he recalls. “Another wanted to have every jazz all-star you can name play on the record. And I said, ‘Wow, if I do that, don’t you think people will forget whose record this is?’ ”

But Verve, according to McBride, was upfront: “They said, ‘No tricks. Take it, and do it your way.’ And that’s the way it’s been.

“And when it came to marketing,” he continues, “they made me happy by saying, ‘The best way to market you is to let your career speak for itself, and let the record speak for itself.’ ”

Beyond the marketing ques tions, McBride was determined to retain musical control of the album.

“Basically, the thing I was most concerned about was that I didn’t want to lose consistency,” he says. “One of the problems with a lot of musicians starting out on a solo career is that they spread themselves too thin. They do one track here that sounds different from the next track, and something else that’s totally different from the next one. I wanted to try to focus on the aspects of music that are most important to me--my composing, the way the bass functions in the band, and the bass soloing.”

McBride’s unusually well-centered creative perspective traces to a family in which music was a regular part of everyday life. With a mother who was a Motown fan, a father who played bass with Philadelphia International R&B; groups and a great-uncle who was “a real jazz nut” and a former bassist with avant-gardist Sunny Murray, McBride has known the appeal of music from the very beginning.

“I guess the moment I really decided to become a bass player,” he says, “was when I was around 4 or 5, and I saw my father playing with Mongo Santamaria. He was playing electric bass, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s such a hip-looking instrument!’ ”

A couple of years later, McBride’s mother bought him his own electric bass.

“And by the end of the week,” he adds, “I knew that playing that bass was what I was going to be doing forever.”

Within three years, McBride had moved to acoustic bass. At 17, shortly after he enrolled at Juilliard, he was working with Bobby Watson at New York’s Birdland, and his status as a first-call rhythm section player was validated.

McBride is eager for the next phase of his career to blossom. Among the obligations that need to be wrapped up before he can truly take off on his own is a projected tour with the Joshua Redman and Benny Green ensembles--both former McBride employers--in which he would assume the unprecedented responsibility (not unlike pitching both games of a baseball double-header) of playing bass with both groups.

For the moment, at least, McBride’s album is an accurate definition of where he is right now.

“I’m pretty satisfied with it,” he says. “But as I go forward, I’d love to get to the level of where Mingus was as a composer, and I want to keep advancing with my playing.

“But the most important thing, no matter where things go with this ‘marketable commodity’ stuff, is that I want to cover all the musical ground I can without straying from the source--which is to swing.”