Christopher McBride, a 2002 graduate of Homewood-Flossmoor High School, won a Grammy Award as the saxophonist on the album by Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra selected in the Best Large Ensemble Jazz category.
Steve Feifke and Bijon Watson, co-leaders of Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra, invited McBride to perform on the album.
According to McBride’s website, he started playing professionally in the Chicago area in 2007. He moved to New York City in 2013. Today he is based in Harlem. His career focuses on performance, education, arranging and composition. As a composer, McBride was recently selected as the 2022 Make Jazz Fellowship artist at The 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California.
He is director of education for the Second Line Arts Collective, a not-for-profit organization based in New Orleans that looks at the jazz experience through the African American landscape. McBride will be in Urbana, Illinois, in April with JazzReach, a not-for-profit founded in 1997 that has become a leading arts organizations dedicated to jazz.
McBride’s talents were recognized at H-F where he organized the band Musical Vibrations. It won second place in the Battle of the Bands his junior year and took the top prize in the Battle of the Bands his senior year.