Makaya McCraven's In These Times sounds like a record that was assembled rather than recorded, and that is precisely the point. Released on September 23, 2022, via International Anthem, Nonesuch, and XL Recordings, the album was built across five studios and four live performance spaces over seven-plus years, with McCraven capturing live, improvised ensemble performances and then retreating to his home studio to cut, loop, layer, and recompose them into something that feels both spontaneous and inevitable. The result is an 11-track suite that carries the warmth of a room and the precision of a producer who knows exactly which 30 seconds of a three-hour session contains the thing he was looking for.
McCraven was born in Paris in 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven and Hungarian singer and flutist Ágnes Zsigmondi, and was raised in the Northampton, Massachusetts area, where his father worked alongside musicians like Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp. That lineage matters to how he hears music: the tradition is an atmosphere, something absorbed early and carried forward as instinct. He moved to Chicago in 2007, and the city's particular convergence of jazz, hip-hop, and experimental music gave his instincts a place to land. His 2015 International Anthem debut, In the Moment, introduced what he called "organic beat music," a method built on nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded at a single Chicago venue over 12 months and 28 shows, then culled and remixed into 19 tracks. The process was new but the sensibility was old: jazz has always been about the relationship between the moment of playing and the moment of listening, and McCraven was simply inserting a third moment, the edit, between them.
In These Times pushes that method into its most ambitious form yet. Recording began as early as November 2016 and continued through March 2022, pulling in performances from Symphony Center in Chicago, JAMDEK Studios, Palisade Studios (formerly Decade Music Studios), the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Shirk Studios, Submerge Studios in Detroit, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Sholo Music Studios in Los Angeles, and McCraven's own Makaya Music Studios. The engineering was shared between Dave Vettraino, David Allen, and McCraven himself, with recording assistance from Najee-Zaid Searcy. What those credits describe is not a conventional studio process but a kind of ongoing field recording project, one where the "field" included concert halls, rehearsal rooms, and a mobile setup at his mother-in-law's house in Hawaii. In a 2022 interview with the Grammy organization, McCraven described how he would take moments from different nights of the same tune in different spaces and layer them, sometimes resampling strings arranged for one piece and using them as the framework for another. The album's sonic identity lives inside that layering: it has the depth of a room and the control of a studio because it is, literally, both at once.
The musicians McCraven drew into this process are some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary jazz, and the album's credits read like a map of a particular creative community. Harpist Brandee Younger, vibraphonist Joel Ross, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Junius Paul, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and saxophonists Greg Ward and Irvin Pierce all appear, alongside pianists Greg Spero and Rob Clearfield, flutist De'Sean Jones, and Matt Gold on guitar. Violinists Macie Stewart and Zara Zaharieva, violist Marta Sofia Honer, and cellist Lia Kohl provide the string textures that give the record its orchestral warmth. The title track, which opens the album at 7:09, demonstrates exactly how McCraven integrates these voices: Younger's harp sits inside the rhythm section rather than above it, Ross's vibraphone functions as melodic color rather than solo instrument, and the whole arrangement breathes in a way that suggests a live performance even though its component parts were captured on different nights in different rooms. One track, "Lullaby," carries a particularly personal weight: it is based on a song originally written by Péter Dabasi and Ágnes Zsigmondi, McCraven's own mother, folding his family's musical inheritance directly into the album's fabric.
The comparison to his earlier work clarifies what is new here. On Universal Beings (2018), McCraven's method was more transparently collective: four sessions in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles, each with different personnel, recorded live and then post-produced into a double LP that wore its seams openly. The Chicago session brought in Shabaka Hutchings, while the London session featured Nubya Garcia, and the resulting music has the energy of genuine first contact between players from different scenes. In These Times is a different kind of record. The compositions had been living in McCraven's working songbook for years before they were recorded; the musicians are all long-term collaborators; and the post-production is a fully realized compositional act. Where Universal Beings captured the electricity of players from different cities finding a groove, In These Times captures the depth of musicians who know each other well enough to leave space. The 11-song suite was created, as International Anthem put it, over "7+ years," as McCraven worked to design "a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions" with orchestral arrangements and the edit-heavy production approach he had been refining across his entire body of work. That description is accurate but undersells the patience involved: seven years of sessions, nine spaces, and a producer willing to wait until the material told him what it wanted to be.
What makes In These Times sound the way it does, finally, is the refusal to choose between live and produced, between jazz and beat music, between the room and the studio. McCraven's editing is precise enough to function as composition and light-handed enough to preserve the feeling of musicians breathing together in a space. The album contains an excerpt from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, a detail that locates it inside a specific Chicago tradition of listening to the city's own voice. Executive producer Scott McNiece, who has been McCraven's collaborator since the earliest International Anthem sessions, shaped the album's release alongside the co-release infrastructure of Nonesuch and XL, giving the record a distribution reach that matched its ambition. In These Times arrived as McCraven's most complete statement, and its sonic identity is inseparable from the method that built it: a construction from many sessions, assembled into something that sounds, on every listen, like it could only have happened this way.
