The Christian McBride Trio closed its first set at the Village Vanguard on Wednesday night with “Killer Joe,” a strutting standard often delivered with the languid cool of a Herman Leonard photograph. The tune, by the saxophonist Benny Golson, hinges on an efficient two-bar bass vamp, with a soulful wisp of melody wafting above. All of which makes it incredibly easy to play, and extremely difficult to invest with vital purpose.

You see where this is headed: The trio, powered from the ground up, made the song feel like a round of detonations from a confetti canon, a matter of giddy oomph and delirium.

As a bass player, Christian McBride favors depth and directness, laying down sturdy grooves that exert irresistible pull. For this, among other reasons, he has been famous, in jazz terms, since he was a teenager.

He’s 40 now, and a happy evangelist for the sort of feel-good enlightenment once routinely expected of modern jazz, when its popular heroes included Mr. Golson, the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the pianist Oscar Peterson. The band Mr. McBride calls Inside Straight, which he formed five years ago, is his trusted weapon in that campaign, and it will appear at the Vanguard this Tuesday through Dec. 23.

But his trio, which is playing there through Sunday, has its own chemistry, brisk and youthful: It’s more inclined to wear its refinement loosely, as an outer garment.

The drummer in the group is Ulysses Owens Jr., a busy sideman who just turned 30 and is making his first appearance at the Vanguard this week. The pianist is Christian Sands, who crossed that threshold at this time last year, as a member of Inside Straight. Both players are shining examples of what’s going right with jazz education, and their bond with Mr. McBride feels respectful but unhindered by deference.

Mr. Sands, 23, gets a soft, ripe sonority out of his chords, and has a facility across the keyboard that might veer toward the profligate, if not for his judicious pacing. On “Easy Walker,” by his former mentor, the pianist and educator Billy Taylor, he tested strategies: a gospelized chordal barrage of the Bobby Timmons variety; rattling tremolos in his right hand, like Earl Hines; the crisp bebop syntax that Taylor used himself.

Later there were more recent signposts in his style, on a half-abstracted reading of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” and on “I Guess I’ll Have to Forget,” a near bossa nova by Mr. McBride. He never ran out of ideas, and by and large they tumbled one into the next.

The set’s cresting wave was “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” — as in Rodgers and Hart, not Prince — set at a thrill-seeking tempo. Mr. Sands reeled off a solo of such hot-dogging virtuosity that the only proper response was to gasp or holler, as some in the crowd did. This was followed by a similar display, on brushes, by Mr. Owens.

The tune ended with a satisfying jolt, and after the cheers quieted, Mr. McBride informed the room that this trio has an album due out in the summer. He didn’t need to remind anyone that there are also a few shows left this week. (New York Times, 14. Dezember 2012)