Christian McBride

Christian McBride, the nine-time Grammy-winning jazz bassist, was collaborating with an assistant to set out breakfast for his manager, his publicist, a reporter and a photographer in the dining room of his home in Montclair, N.J. It became clear that improvisation would be on the menu.

“Coffee? Tea?” offered Mr. McBride, 52. “But this is an old house,” he added a bit ruefully. “We can’t plug in the teakettle and the coffee machine at the same time.”

The Arts and Crafts-style house was built in 1910, and Mr. McBride, who will headline the grand finale of the annual Montclair Jazz Festival on Sept. 14, is not the house’s first music-industry resident. Local legend has it that an audio engineer who worked on a few projects with John Lennon and Yoko Ono rented the house for a time in the 1970s. And, after a marathon recording session on site, the couple supposedly slept there.

To memorialize the snooze, the house’s previous owner put a sign on the door to a cork-lined room on the top floor.

Mr. McBride and his wife, Melissa Walker, a jazz vocalist, who moved in nine years ago, have put their mark on the property musically, aesthetically and, as the hydrangeas in the leafy backyard make clear, horticulturally. Ms. Walker is the founder of Jazz House Kids, a nonprofit that provides music classes and cultural programming for children and adults, and Mr. McBride is its artistic director. He is also the host of the NPR show “Jazz Night in America.”

Ms. Walker, who lived in nearby West Orange during the couple’s courtship, was eager to stay in New Jersey after their 2005 wedding. Mr. McBride, a native of Philadelphia and a lover of New York City, wasn’t so sure. “I thought I would live and die in New York,” he said. “But Melissa doesn’t really like the city.” Through an unscientific survey, he learned that many of his musician friends, onetime skeptics of the Garden State, had since converted and were singing its praises.

“They said, ‘You should check out Montclair,’” Mr. McBride recalled. “And almost everyone I knew who lived in Montclair loved it because it’s almost like an artist colony here. If a giant hand could take a little piece of Greenwich Village and move it over to New Jersey, that’s what Montclair feels like.”

For almost a decade, Mr. McBride and Ms. Walker lived in a midcentury modern house near Montclair State University. From the front yard, Mr. McBride could see the Manhattan skyline.

But when Ms. Walker’s mother, then a resident of Vancouver Island, began showing signs of dementia, the couple decided that she should move in with them. The hunt was on for a bigger house, led by Ms. Walker because Mr. McBride was out on the road.

The Arts and Crafts house, which financially fit the bill, was surprisingly spry for its age and had retained appealing features like the molding, the hardware on the front door, and the wood staircase and railing.

However well preserved, a property in its second century is occasionally going to have issues. The plaster walls needed attention, as did the kitchen. Mr. McBride isn’t necessarily the man to call at such times, even if he did once temporarily fix the water heater.

“Would you like my mother’s quote?” Ms. Walker asked. “She said, ‘I just love Christian, but he sure ain’t handy.’” (Ms. Walker’s mother was in residence until her death in 2018.)

Mr. McBride ceded design decisions to his wife, who generally went with soft grays and beiges but gave each room a dose of a dominant color. “Christian plays music,” Ms. Walker said. “I see music in colors.”

She chose aubergine for the primary bedroom, orange for the living room and red for the family room.

Thanks to the lineup of Grammy Awards and other trophies, as well as Mr. McBride’s many signed baseballs, the family room has accents of silver, gold and white.

“Baseball is the sport my grandfather raised me on,” Mr. McBride said. His cache includes a ball signed by former New York Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, who, he noted, has “turned into a good jazz guitarist.”

In the right corner of the living room stands a bass whose previous owner was Ray Brown, the renowned jazz double bassist who was once married to Ella Fitzgerald. Mr. McBride, who affectionately refers to the instrument as Raymond, is relaxed about the provenance: “Ray wasn’t emotionally attached to it, so why should I be?”

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor, an artist and the daughter of family friends, painted the portrait of the couple that hangs above the fireplace in the living room. Ms. Walker said Ms. Taylor’s parents had commissioned it as a gift to Christian on his 50th birthday.

The dining room is the site of annual Super Bowl parties, post-Montclair Jazz Festival brunches, and dinners for the faculty and supporters of Jazz House Kids.

They can all feast on a painting by Chris Osborne, whom Mr. McBride knew from her years as the manager of the jazz department at a branch of Tower Records.

“Little did I know she’s also an artist,” he said. “She did what she called a fantasy series, and she asked about my fantasy. And I told her, ‘Working with Frank Sinatra, James Brown and Redd Foxx at the Apollo.’ Voilà!”

Ms. Walker has her sphere of influence — the first, second and third floors. Mr. McBride has his — the basement. That’s where you’ll find him listening to music, composing and arranging it and recording “Jazz Night in America,” He chills with the help of his PlayStation 5.

In the occasional spare moment, he tries to bring order to his catholic assortment of albums and CDs — Leonard Bernstein, the Grateful Dead, James Brown, the New Age harpist Andreas Vollenweider, among them — that fill two walls of custom-built media shelves.

A few years ago, an assistant organized the whole shebang. But since then, Mr. McBride said, his collection has grown by at least 25 percent, “so now, I have another pile that hasn’t been cataloged.”

Though Mr. McBride doesn’t generally rehearse at home, choosing instead to use space in the building that quarters Jazz House Kids, musical inspiration is always close at hand. Along the wall of the stairs leading to the basement are several pieces of framed sheet music with notes from Roy Hargrove, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard and Herbie Hancock.

“I’ve worked with all these jazz legends through the years, and I thought I should have something in writing,” Mr. McBride said.

During his early days in Montclair, Mr. McBride was unnerved by the quiet. “The windows were open and Christian leaned out and said, ‘If I have to listen to any more chirping birds …,’” Ms. Walker recalled with a laugh. “He said: ‘I need. I need sirens. I need people screaming.’”

No more.

“All those years I lived in New York, I was on the road for weeks upon weeks, and when I came back, the first thing I wanted to do was go out and hang in the Village,” Mr. McBride said, sitting in the back garden among the roses planted by Ms. Walker. “I was going to clubs. I was going uptown to Harlem to hang out and just immerse myself in the rhythm of the city. I didn’t spend a lot of time at home.”