Makaya McCraven released Universal Beings on October 26, 2018, through International Anthem Recording Company, and the conversation around it settled almost immediately into geography. Four cities, four ensembles, four sides of vinyl. That framing is accurate but incomplete, and it has quietly flattened the most interesting thing about the record. The four cities are the occasion. The method is the argument. What McCraven built across those sessions is not a document of improvisation. It is a composed work assembled from improvisation's raw material, and the instrument he used to compose it was the edit.
The sessions happened across five months in 2017 and early 2018. The New York side was recorded live on August 29th, 2017, at H0L0 in Ridgewood, Queens, with Brandee Younger on harp, Joel Ross on vibraphone, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Dezron Douglas on double bass. Four days later, on September 2nd, the Chicago side went down at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport, with Shabaka Hutchings on tenor saxophone, Reid again on cello, and Junius Paul on double bass. The London side was captured on October 19th, 2017, at Total Refreshment Studios in Stoke Newington, with Nubya Garcia on tenor saxophone, Ashley Henry on Rhodes piano, and Daniel Casimir on double bass. The final session, the Los Angeles side, was recorded on January 30th, 2018, at guitarist Jeff Parker's house in Altadena, with Parker on guitar, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on violin, Anna Butterss on double bass, and Carlos Niño on percussion. Every musician played without a script. McCraven was the only constant across all four rooms.
What happened after those rooms is where the record actually gets made. McCraven took the raw recordings back to his Chicago home studio and did what he calls "recontextualization," a word that undersells the transformation. He had been developing this process since his 2015 International Anthem debut, In The Moment, which was culled from nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded over 12 months and 28 shows at a single Chicago venue. The method: record live improvisation, then edit, loop, pitch, layer, and overdub the results until something new emerges that could not have existed in the room. By the time Universal Beings arrived, McCraven had refined the approach on two mixtape releases, 2017's Highly Rare and the 2018 CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape Where We Come From, the latter drawing from sessions at Total Refreshment Centre, the same London space where the Universal Beings London side would be recorded months later. He knew the room. He knew what the edit could do to it.
Pitchfork's Nate Chinen described the result as something "informed by ambient and hip-hop protocols as well as state-of-the-art jazz hyperfluency," and that triangulation is precise. The comparison that keeps surfacing in serious writing about McCraven is Teo Macero's work with Miles Davis, the producer who assembled Bitches Brew and On the Corner from tape loops and spliced improvisations. JazzTimes made the parallel explicit, noting that Universal Beings speaks "to the mixer's re-contextualization skills as much as any musician's standard technique." But McCraven's own reference points run closer to Madlib and J Dilla than to Macero, and that distinction matters. Where Macero was a producer shaping a bandleader's vision, McCraven is the drummer, the bandleader, and the producer simultaneously. The rhythmic intelligence that drives the sessions is the same intelligence that decides what survives in the edit. When the groove on "Atlantic Black" builds from Hutchings's tenor into something hammering and urgent before dissolving into near-silence, that arc is not a preserved accident. It is a decision, made later, alone, with headphones.
The four ensembles each bring a distinct character, and the album is honest about that. The New York side opens with "A Queen's Intro" and moves through "Holy Lands" and "Young Genius," the harp and vibraphone and cello creating something closer to chamber music than to a jazz gig, meditative and atmospheric. The Chicago side sharpens into something more intense: Hutchings's saxophone on "Atlantic Black" and "Wise Man, Wiser Woman" has an urgent, nervous flutter that the Jazzwise review called "the most effective, future-facing context" in which the saxophonist had been heard. The London side, recorded with musicians McCraven was meeting for the first time, carries a different energy. "Suite Haus" moves at a brisk, almost ska-inflected pace around Garcia's strong melodic instinct, and "The Newbies Lift Off" gives Henry's Rhodes piano the room to lead. The Los Angeles side is the most open and eclectic, with Atwood-Ferguson's violin and Niño's percussion pulling the music toward something between fusion and sound installation. On vinyl, each city gets its own side, which is the right format: these are four albums in conversation, not one album with four chapters.
What holds them together is not a shared aesthetic. It is McCraven's ear, applied after the fact. Joel Ross, who was new to New York at the time of the Queens session, described that August night as "the first completely improvised performance I had ever done," a gig where McCraven simply said "come on, we're just gonna play." The musicians in each city brought what they brought. McCraven then listened to hundreds of minutes of tape and found the record inside it. That process has a name in the hip-hop world. It is called production. In the jazz world, it has been slower to earn full credit as a compositional act, perhaps because the mythology of jazz centers on the irreducible moment of performance, the room, the breath, the decision made in real time. Universal Beings does not dismiss that mythology. It extends it. The improvised moment is the seed. The edit is where the plant grows. McCraven is the gardener who knows that the two acts are equally serious, and equally musical, and that a drummer with a good ear and an Ableton session can do what Thelonious Monk did with silence: make the space between the notes the most important thing.
