Makaya McCraven

Makaya McCraven, who works as a drummer, composer, and producer, fuses an array of inventive musical styles while pursuing fresh sonic paths. Often described as a "beat scientist," he put out In the Moment during 2015, blending jazz-funk, post-bop, vanguard jazz, and fusion together with hip-hop, rock, and global rhythmic traditions that he integrated into unconventional beat experiments. McCraven has fronted his own recordings and live tours while also serving as a sideman alongside guitarist Bobby Broom, pianist Greg Spero, and trumpeter Marquis Hill. The 2018 album Universal Beings captured live performances that were also filmed across three cities spanning the Atlantic, drawing on a shifting roster of musicians from various countries. During 2020 he released the accompanying soundtrack under the title Universal Beings E&F Sides. For the 2021 project Deciphering the Message, the drummer received access to explore Blue Note's archives and went on to remix and supplement thirteen jazz classics drawn from that catalog. Seven years of work went into 2022's In These Times, which incorporated contributions from more than a dozen collaborators.

Born in Paris during 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, whose credits include Sam Rivers and Archie Shepp, and Hungarian folk singer Agnes Zsigmondi, McCraven moved with his family to Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley as a child, the same region where Shepp and Yusef Lateef resided. Shepp and Lateef supported his parents in guiding the youngster through exposure to diverse musical traditions. He started drumming before reaching age ten and took his music studies seriously once in high school. His group Cold Duck Complex produced three albums, toured the region opening for hip-hop performers, and gained popularity at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While attending that university, McCraven advanced his training and performed with the University Jazz Orchestra.

After settling in Chicago in 2006, he quickly became a central figure in the city's vibrant music community, collaborating with players that ranged from Ari Brown and Broom to Corey Wilkes and Henry Johnson. He explained to Chicago Magazine that his decision to move to the Windy City stemmed from "a tradition in Chicago that's not stuck in the same trends as a place like New York. Chicago has a tradition of subversive music, and that, to me, is really intriguing, especially today, in times of political resistance. The tradition of a lot of Chicago music is one of resistance or labor or oppression and corruption." McCraven built his reputation through appearances on albums by Apollo Sunshine and Kris Delmhorst.

His debut as a bandleader came with the trio recording Split Decision, which Chicago Sessions issued in 2012 and which included bassist Tim Seisser and pianist Andrew Toombs. While maintaining a rigorous touring schedule both in the area and nationwide, McCraven developed material that evolved into his breakthrough release In the Moment, issued by International Anthem in 2015. Over the course of a year he documented twenty-eight concerts at Chicago's The Bedford, working with a rotating ensemble that featured Jeff Parker, Joshua Abrams, Hill, and bassist Junius Paul, resulting in forty-eight hours of material. He then shaped and reworked the recordings into a double-length collection of potent jazz, beat, and improvisational music. The album appeared on numerous year-end best-of lists across media outlets and earned favorable notices from the New York Times and Jazz Times. In 2016 he assembled another forty minutes of material and released it as In the Moment E & F Sides, establishing a working method he would repeat.

That year he also drummed for Hill on The Way We Play, released by Concord. McCraven and his ensembles performed across Europe on the festival circuit and at North American jazz festivals including Newport, Detroit, and Los Angeles, while headlining a widely praised show at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. Additionally in 2016, he and his band filled Chicago's Danny's Tavern using a four-track cassette recorder; after capturing the performance in raw bootleg quality, he edited and remixed the results into the 2017 lo-fi suite Highly Rare, which merged free-jazz and hip-hop elements from the live four-track source. Its first edition appeared as a limited cassette housed in screen-printed, string-sealed, firecracker-red envelopes before later surfacing digitally and on LP through his own International Phonograph imprint.

The next year McCraven added to producer MAST's (Tim Conley) Thelonious Sphere Monk, a bold reinterpretation of the composer's and pianist's well-known compositions. His subsequent project Where We Come From followed the pattern of earlier works yet introduced a variation: he stepped beyond his usual Chicago musicians to record a London performance in October 2017 featuring Kamaal Williams and Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards, then used that recording as the foundation for an intricate mix. After the session he passed the tape to numerous producers for chopping, splicing, and remixing; once they completed their work he reclaimed the tracks and layered his own rhythmic sensibility. The outcome merged exotic strands from jazz history with hip-hop production and deep, funky grooves. International Anthem put out Where We Come From in summer 2018, promoting the album with four documentary-style videos.

That autumn the label released the double-length Universal Beings, drawn from four separate sessions held in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles with four distinct groups of musicians that variously included Tomeka Reid, Junius Paul, Jeff Parker, Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and Carlos Niño. The album entered the Jazz Albums chart inside the Top 20 and earned best-of-year recognition from jazz and pop critics worldwide. Less than a year afterward McCraven and French trumpeter Antoine Berjeaut issued the limited-edition Moving Cities, which connected contemporary jazz currents from Paris and Chicago through an international group of sidemen that included bassist Junius Paul, saxophonist Julien Lourau, synthesist Arnaud Roulin, electronicist Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch, and guitarists Guillaume Magne and Matt Gold.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of musician, poet, and author Gil Scott-Heron's final studio album I'm New Here, XL Recordings head and producer of that recording Richard Russell invited McCraven to create his own reimagining of the material. Released in February 2020 under the title We're New Again: A Reimagining and arriving exactly ten years after Scott-Heron's original, the album followed the creative direction of Jamie xx's acclaimed 2011 remix album We're New Here; it became McCraven's first release of 2020 and featured assistance from Brandee Younger, Jeff Parker, Ben Lamar Gay, and Paul.

McCraven next turned to unused recordings from the Universal Beings sessions while searching for music to complete director Mark Pallman's documentary on the album's making, the accompanying global tour, and the drummer's broader musical approach. He located additional tracks that displayed the same inventive energy as the earlier release. Drawing on those concert tapes as source material, he incorporated studio edits and new overdubs, yielding the album Universal Beings E&F Sides, which International Anthem issued as an independent release in summer 2020.

During the following year McCraven delivered Deciphering the Message, comprising thirteen remixes of selections from the Blue Note vault originally performed by Art Blakey, Eddie Gale, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Jack Wilson, and others. He recruited a studio ensemble that included Jeff Parker, Marquis Hill, Joel Ross, and Junius Paul to assist with the project.

In September 2022 McCraven issued In These Times, an eleven-track suite assembled across more than seven years. He aimed to craft a deeply personal yet widely accessible synthesis that combined odd-meter original compositions from his active repertoire with orchestral large-ensemble arrangements and the edit-driven organic beat music he has cultivated throughout his catalog. Among his many collaborators were harpist Brandee Younger, guitarist Jeff Parker, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and saxophonist Greg Ward.