Not just all that jazz

Christian McBride, the wunderkind bassist, is finally having a middle-aged thought.

The leading jazz bassist of his generation wishes he weren't on the road so much. Speaking by phone the other day after a snowstorm in Santa Fe, N.M., McBride said he's keen to spend more time at home in Montclair, N.J., even when the plumbing breaks.

"We had one of the pipes in the laundry room just fall off the wall, and there was water shooting all over the place," said McBride, 35, who lives there with his wife, jazz singer Melissa Walker. "Boy, that was scary."

Most of the breaks McBride attends to these days are of the soloing kind. The much-in-demand bassist will appear tonight at the Keswick Theatre to stoke the fusion pyrotechnics of guitarist Pat Metheny's trio with drummer Antonio Sanchez.

McBride, who started playing with Metheny in 1993, still lives a lot of his life out of a suitcase. He will be backing keyboardist Chick Corea for a tour this year. And McBride recently won a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation grant, enabling him to take his quartet - pianist Geoff Keezer, saxophonist Ron Blake, and drummer Terreon Gully - to Philadelphia and other venues this year.

But McBride, a graduate of Philly's performing arts high school, is now as apt to be composing or playing the role of booking impresario. He's writing commissioned works, picking musicians for Los Angeles venues, and promoting Harlem's first jazz museum.

Jazz players have not historically roosted in suburbia or appreciated hip-hop, but McBride does both proudly. He grew up in Philly listening to soul singer James Brown, and believes that jazz has grown from the energy injected by hip-hop and funk.

"The best music has always come from the street," he said. "What you're studying in jazz is an older form of hip-hop. Even in the music of Monk and Bird and Dizzy, there's a certain guttural element as well as high art that a lot of people forget."

McBride's funk leanings are featured on several discs, including 2001's

The Philadelphia Experiment

, which was stocked with Philly homeboys such as pianist Uri Caine, guitarist Pat Martino, trumpeter John Swana, and drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots.

"Hip-hop now officially has its first generation of old cats," McBride said. "You now have a generation of hip-hop guys sitting around in a rocking chair, saying 'The young boys ain't doing nothing.' They sound a lot like old jazz players."

McBride isn't one of them. Among his new tricks are overseeing jazz programming for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, and planning gigs at the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

McBride is part of a trend of venues picking established musicians to plan their jazz schedules. The San Francisco Jazz Festival had tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman as its artistic director. Pianist Danilo Perez has a similar role for the Kimmel Center.

"It's only wise for many of these great performing arts centers to get artistic direction from an artist," McBride said. "It's been quite satisfying and fulfilling."

A high point of his L.A. tenure enabled McBride to present his big band with James Brown in 2006, "by far the biggest thrill I ever had in life as a musician."

McBride's L.A. connections will let him showcase his compositions. At Disney Hall on May 16, he'll present

The Movement Revisited

, a jazz opus for big band and gospel choir that honors Malcolm X, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Muhammad Ali. "That's easily the most ambitious project I've ever written for," he said.

McBride is also writing big-band music for a performance at New York's Tribeca Arts Center on April 17. "I just love a big band. I don't get a chance to do it often enough," he said. "The whole idea of composing and writing is so wonderful. It's like giving birth. That's something unmistakably yours."

McBride is codirector of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, which seeks to document that community's key role in jazz history. He said he was inspired to get involved by the nurturing he received from the late saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., as well as Lovett Hines and George Allen, venerated Philly jazz educators.

The Jazz Museum of Harlem just got approval for its first permanent building in the Victoria Theater, a few doors down from the Apollo Theater. McBride hopes it can move in by 2012.

"Out of all the great cultural institutions in Harlem, there's not one dedicated to jazz," he said. "That should come to an end."