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In These Times
Released 9/23 on International Anthem, Nonesuch + XL Recordings
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Released September 23, 2022
In These Times is a collection of polytemporal compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as McCraven’s personal experience as a product of a multinational, working class musician community. It’s the recording that he’s been trying to create for 7+ years, as it’s been consistently in process in the background while he’s put forth a prolific run of releases including: In The Moment (2015), Highly Rare (2017), Where We Come From (2018), Universal Beings (2018), We’re New Again (2020), Universal Beings E&F Sides (2020), and Deciphering the Message (2021). With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in five different studios and four live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work at home. Featuring orchestral, large ensemble arrangements interwoven with the signature “organic beat music” sound that’s become his signature, the album is an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer. But moreover, it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer.
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Drummer, producer & beat scientist Makaya McCraven digs through the Blue Note vaults with this new remix project that puts a modern bounce on jazz classics by Art Blakey, Horace Silver, & more. McCraven's mastery of the loop is akin to hip-hop's most celebrated beatmakers like J Dilla & Madlib, both of whom have also remixed Blue Note tracks, but McCraven's unique approach also incorporates new recorded elements including his own drums, Joel Ross' vibraphone, Jeff Parker's guitar, & more. Released November 19, 2021.
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To mark the tenth anniversary of the release of I’m New Here , the thirteenth - and last - studio album from the legendary US musician, poet and author Gil Scott-Heron, XL Recordings will release a unique reinterpretation of the album by acclaimed US jazz musician Makaya McCraven. Released December 5, 2019.
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Bridging the spaces between the Paris and Chicago scenes, Moving Cities brings together the best of both worlds. Initiated by French trumpet player Antoine Berjeaut and Chicago-based drummer/producer Makaya McCraven (along with a cast including bassist Junius Paul and saxophonist Julien Lourau), Moving Cities is emblematic of a new, utterly modern jazz going through a true aesthetic revolution. Moving Cities started as a live laboratory set up by Berjeaut and McCraven; it echoes the recent evolution of international metropolises constantly torn between individualism and collective endeavors, in a disrupted geography. Released December 6, 2019.
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An addendum to Makaya McCraven's critically-acclaimed 2018 release Universal Beings, which The New York Times said "affirms the drummer and beatsmith's position as a major figure in creative music," Universal Beings E&F Sides presents fourteen new pieces of organic beat music cut from the original sessions, prepared and produced by Makaya as a soundtrack to the Universal Beings documentary film.
Directed by Mark Pallman, the Universal Beings documentary follows Makaya to Los Angeles, Chicago, London and New York City for a behind the scenes look into the making of the artists breakthrough album, taking the viewer through the story of Makaya's life, his process and the community of musicians that helped bring this project to life. The Universal Beings documentary and Universal Beings E&F Sides album release July 31st 2020.
Named one of the best albums of 2018 by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, Stereogum, Billboard, SPIN, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, and more, Universal Beings was recorded at four sessions in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles, and features some of the best "new" jazz players from those hot bed cities: Brandee Younger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niño and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson - all of whom feature on Universal Beings E&F Sides. Released July 31, 2020
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Paris-born, New England-raised, long-time Chicago-residing Makaya McCraven has been at the forefront of genre-redefining movements in jazz since 2015, when he introduced the world to his unique brand of ‘organic beat music’ on the breakout album In The Moment. Culled, cut, post-produced & re-composed by Makaya using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, through incubation & experimentation In The Moment established a procedural blueprint that he has since been sharpening & developing.
Honing this process on narrower sets of source material, Makaya followed up In The Moment with 2 mixtape releases – 2017’s Highly Rare, a lo-fi free-jazz-meets-hip-hop suite he made from a live 4-track recording, and June 2018’s Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), which he produced using live recordings from London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre (captured at a showcase called CHICAGOxLONDON).
Now, after 4+ years of refining his approach, Makaya McCraven puts forth an ambitious new work – Universal Beings – a culmination of concepts conceived by In The Moment, and his most elegant & articulated work yet.
Spurred by a desire to connect with old friends & new collaborators in places where similar spirits & diasporic jazz innovations are thriving, Makaya worked with International Anthem across late 2017 & early 2018 to setup intimate live sessions in New York & Chicago, and pop-up “studio” sessions in London & Los Angeles. Though the contexts and logistics were D.I.Y. (as they almost always are with IARC), the friends & friends-of-friends that Makaya was able to enlist are top tier players across the board. Some might call them super groups of “new” jazz musicians from their respective cities, with Makaya as a common denominator. But more importantly, collectively they make an inspiring display of the organic global inter-connectedness of the Black American music tradition in 2018.
Physically spanning national & international borders to create an album that musically spans deep spiritual jazz meditations, pulsing post-bop grooves & straight-ahead boom-bap, Makaya McCraven defies the simplifications of revisionism & regionalism while celebrating the sounds, settings & stories that define the provenance of his work. Universal Beings projects an all-encompassing message of unity, peace & power by embracing transcendence in all its expressions. Released October 26, 2018.
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Recorded live at Total Refreshment Centre 18 & 19 October 2017 (CHICAGOxLONDON).
Live recordings mixed at Total Refreshment Studios 20 & 21 October 2017.
Remixed live at Total Refreshment Centre 22 October 2017 (FRESH ROASTED: Live Beat-Making & Battle). Released July 27, 2018.
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Highly Rare is a new mixtape produced & arranged by Makaya McCraven.
It’s titled Highly Rare not only for the format of its initial release (a limited-edition run of cassettes packaged in screen-printed, string-sealed, firecracker red envelopes), but foremost for the context of the source material’s capture.
The sounds were recorded to four track cassette tape at a DIY show packed into the confines of Chicago dive Danny's Tavern, a place definitely not known for having live bands, let alone live recordings. It's a place known to vinyl heads both locally and globally as a legendary hub in the crate digger diaspora. It's the place where Jeff Parker learned how to DJ. It's the place where Dante Carfagna held down a rare soul party for over a decade, where he first dropped public needles on 45s that would eventually make compilations he curated for Numero Group and Chocolate Industries. It's the place where DJ Shadow still does sets on the low when he rolls through town
And on one highly rare night in November 2016 Danny's was the place where we invited an "International Anthem All Stars" type of improvising ensemble (Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Nick Mazzarella and Ben Lamar Gay) to play in support of DJ sets by LeFtO, who was in transit from Belgium, hitting local spots under the direction of Chicago scene sage King Hippo. Damn-near 0 degrees and just days after the death sentence of the American presidential election, the sounds the musicians conjured were thick with the bitter cold darkness that hung heavy in the air, punctuated with moments of joyful determination – the kind that can only be accessed when such impending doom triggers passionate adrenalized bursts by creators in survival mode.
Cogent as the cultural context of that November night at Danny's is the compositional prowess that Makaya exercised in post to make Highly Rare the impressive final piece it is. Demonstrating a deeply attuned development of the production approach he forayed in the creation of his 2015 breakout In The Moment, Makaya again took stereo mixes of the full band improvisations into his lab to edit, loop, layer and arrange the tracks, tediously constructing a vivid new slate of sounds that tell an infinitely more colorful tale than the straight takes ever could. The rough and raw edges of low fidelity cassette recording combine with the elegance and wit of Makaya McCraven's production touch to make Highly Rare a highly relevant artifact in the ever-unfolding history of Chicago style creative music.
Released November 17, 2017
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"One of the most important recordings to date in the modern jazz world." – Turntable Lab
Makaya McCraven's early 2015 offering In The Moment was pared from nearly 48 hours of live, improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows. Working with instrumental contributions from an array of Chicago jazz players (including Jeff Parker, Joshua Abrams, Marquis Hill, and Matt Ulery), Makaya culled, cut, rendered and remixed the mass of sounds into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music for the original 80-minute, 2xLP issue.
At the close of a breakthrough 2015 (with In The Moment receiving high marks from BBC’s Gilles Peterson, New York Times, and ‘Best of 2015’ honors from Los Angeles Times, Apple Music, NPR Music’s Jazz Critics Poll, and more), International Anthem announced a limited vinyl pressing of In The Moment E & F Sides, which contains 40 new minutes of music produced by Makaya from the same source material and mastered by Low End Theory founder Daddy Kev.
The In The Moment Deluxe Edition compiles both the original 19-track In The Moment and the 40-minute E & F Sides into a single 3xLP (and 2xCD) collection. Released March 18, 2016.
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The In the Moment Remix Tape reworks the already-chopped, altered, and looped spontaneous compositions of Makaya McCraven's 2xLP In the Moment. Crossing the boundaries of improvisation, composition and sampling, nine producer/beat makers from around the globe reworked the tracks into new beats and creations of repurposed audio. Makaya then remixed their remixes into two continuous mixtape sides, blending them with beats of his own, resampling the samplers of his original sliced and sampled spontaneous compositions. Released September 22, 2015.
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Nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows - culled, cut, rendered, and remixed into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music. Released January 20, 2015.
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“... brilliant premier release of the globetrotting drummer/composer/bandleader, and in it you will find an agile and beautifully conversant take on the traditional piano trio that features McCraven, pianist Andrew Toombs and bassist Tim Seisser. This trio stretches time like a contortionist, but with a deep sense of musical communication that belies their considerably few years together as a band... their intuitive communal sense of groove and rhythmic flow is completely remarkable.” - Brent-Anthony Johnson, Bass Frontiers Magazine. Released July 24, 2012.
Press
Zine
In 2014 Makaya McCraven was interviewed for the politically progressive Chicago based publication, In These Times, where he discussed with Jeremy Gantz, what it is to be a working artist in the current climate. Honestly delving into topics of navigating the financial and social landscape of the industry, the misconceptions of being a musician, the wide range of work within performing arts, concluding “The dream of all jazz artists is to have enough time to think about their work and play and to develop”. Eight years on, this print material seeks to further explore the question: what does it mean to be a working artist in these times? Opening up the dialogue to Makaya’s community of artists he has collaborated with or admired from afar; each offering different perspectives to add to this necessary conversation. These illuminating interviews were conducted by author, journalist and broadcaster, Emma Warren.
The interviews seek to help us understand the discipline required to foster musical creativity , the general frustrations and administrative responsibilities, the resolute nature of artists to follow their dreams and ultimately the reality of what it means to be a working artist in 2022. This material is provided alongside Makaya’s latest album aptly named, In These Times, a time refined songbook of poly- temporal compositions collapsing past, present and future into bold & manifold arrangements of orchestral progressive music.
About
Makaya McCraven is a prolific drummer, composer and producer.
His newest album, In These Times, is the triumphant finale of a project 7+ years in the making. It’s a preeminent addition to his already-acclaimed and extensive discography, and it’s the album he’s been trying to make since he started making records.
McCraven believes that the word “jazz” is “insufficient, at best, to describe the phenomenon we’re dealing with.” The artist, who has been aptly called a “cultural synthesizer”, has a unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st century folk music. Profiled in Vice, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and NPR, among other publications, he and the music he makes today are at the very vanguard of that phenomenon. According to the New York Times, “McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality”. The artist explained to NPR in 2019, "I don't think what I'm doing is necessarily that far off of the legacy of jazz that I grew up in ... I think one of the things that gives it strength is that people want to argue over it. That's a good sign. That means there's life here."
Born in Paris in the Autumn of 1983 to Hungarian singer and flutist Ágnes Zsigmondi and African-American expat jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, Makaya was raised in a vibrant, creative community in the Northampton, Massachusetts area, where his father often played with artists like saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Marion Brown, multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, and saxophonist Archie Shepp, as well as a cadre of African Gnawa musicians. That scene, with its enticing blend of cultures, helped establish his philosophy around jazz as folk music. Meanwhile, his mother’s music blended Eastern European folk traditions, concurrently shaping his conceptions about the role of music in building and reflecting communities.
“I'm really drawn to folk music. Music of aural tradition, music that is of the people where it's more of a collective experience of music and dance and culture that we all participate in and know as part of our being or as part of who we are.” He sees his work as a continuation of those traditions, noting, “I like to teach the music to musicians by ear, and hope even when I bring in more challenging rhythms, or difficult time signatures, I am able to do it in a way that is of the body and of the people of the earth in a way that’s not necessarily some intellectual experiment, but more something that's dealing with people.”
While immersed as a youth in global folk traditions, he was also a child of the nineties, deeply influenced by sample-based hip-hop. He observed that jazz was sometimes perceived by his peers as “something that was old, corny, white... going to get you beat up.” This directly countered his own experience with the music: “That was such a strange idea to me, because the guys I grew up around were cool, and [weren’t] buttoned up like that.”
Eventually he discovered bridges between jazz and hip-hop, including classic jazz records being sampled by hip-hop producers such as Pete Rock, and began to devote energy to “reappropriate this music to be what it is, what it means to me, and what it means for my people."
After cutting his teeth in the Western Massachusetts music scene, co-founding a jazz-hip hop band called Cold Duck Complex that ultimately opened for The Pharcyde, Digable Planets, and the Wu-Tang Clan, he and his partner (now wife, comparative race studies scholar Nitasha Tamar Sharma) moved to Chicago in 2006. McCraven soon found himself immersed in both the creative and straight-ahead jazz scenes, proving his versatility, and along the way finding a community that mirrored the pulsating scene that birthed him artistically. Within five years’ time, he’d established a name for himself, gigging alongside scene stalwarts like Willie Pickens, Marquis Hill and Jeff Parker.
He first connected with the founders of Chicago’s International Anthem label in late 2011, and across 2012-2013 they hosted and recorded a series of improvised jazz nights featuring his combo at The Bedford, a club situated in what was once an old basement bank vault. McCraven took 48 hours of recordings and sculpted beguiling hip-hop beats, not unlike how Teo Macero looped and assembled Miles Davis’ On the Corner from improvised magic. At the time, McCraven thought of the project, which became the 2015 double LP release In The Moment, as an opportunity to connect and to “find a young audience in this music. It just felt like the right time and a place where I could really connect with people.” That notion proved prophetic: JazzTimes called the album “one of the year's most mesmerizing releases,” the record was an “Album of the Week'' pick by taste-making DJ Gilles Peterson on BBC 6 Music, and it was chosen for “Best of 2015” lists by PopMatters, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times.
McCraven continued to hone his process of live improvisation and sampling with Highly Rare in 2017 (crafted from a live set recorded at Danny’s Tavern in Chicago), 2018’s Where We Come From(CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), which was built from recordings of a showcase at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, and Universal Beings (also released in 2018). Universal Beings, consisting of augmented live sessions in Chicago and New York, in addition to pop-up studio sessions in London and Los Angeles, concretely reflects his borderless multi-national ethos. The work featured varying configurations of international players, including Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings from London, Junius Paul and Tomeka Reid of Chicago, Anna Butterss and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson from Los Angeles, and Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas from New York.
The title of the album was culled from a sampled passage on the track “Brighter Days Beginning,”, in which percussionist Carlos Niño offers, “We’re universal beings,” a theme of borderlessness that resonated deeply with McCraven, who grew up in a multicultural household and community. “I’m not beholden to this border or this city,” McCraven told Vice in 2018, “What is a place? Other than the people. It’s just dirt, you know?” The resulting album was called “radiant” and “hypnotic” by Pitchfork.
In 2019, McCraven both delivered a triumphant Jazz Night in America performance at South Shore Cultural Center in Chicago, and mounted a multimedia performance of an early iteration of what became his new album In These Times, at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis.
In the meantime, he remixed Gil Scott-Heron’s final album (2010’s I’m New Here) for 2020’s We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, issued Universal Beings E+F Sides (also in 2020), and delved into the venerable Blue Note Records catalog in 2021 for Deciphering the Message, each project also employing new improvisations and sampling, helping to further cement his “beat scientist” moniker. Concurrently, the seeds for 2022’sIn These Times were budding, and their nurseries were stages around the globe. McCraven explains, “As I've been touring, I've been performing music off of the record In These Times... When In the Moment took off and I started touring a lot, we would go on the road and 50% of the music was just my concept and my compositions.”
In These Times, a collection of polytemporal compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as McCraven’s personal experience as a product of a multinational, working class musician community, is the recording that McCraven has been trying to create for 7+ years, as it’s been slowly cooking in the background while his other works were released. He began recording In These Times seven years ago, but “for whatever reason, Universal Beings just came to fruition much quicker. It just took more time for this to mature into everything it's become. With the success of Universal Beings and the Universal Beings concerts that we did (with Red Bull) in Chicago at South Shore Cultural Center and le poisson rouge in New York, I had an opportunity to realize the record not as a collection of four sides of trios and quartets, but I turned that record as a performance into a 10 to 12-person concert, and that experience ended up evolving my approach to In These Times.”
In These Times encompasses all he’s lived through, as well as his lineage, while also pushing the music forward. Music critic Passion of the Weiss suggested that “McCraven’s work, both with younger players and the sounds of older recordings, is part of a necessary conversation about the next evolution of the Black improvised music known colloquially as ‘jazz.’ He’s found the threads connecting the past with the present, and is either wrapping them with new colors and textures, or he’s plucking them gleefully like the strings of a grand instrument.” McCraven concurs: “To me, that is the tradition that I want to try to take part in. Being well-rooted, but walking into the future, is really what all of the leaders in this music have done that I admire. And I think that resonates with people. Something that's like how we know it, but is evolving... It's just where I am at, where we're at, and the evolution of that, and that's what I'm trying to be.”
- Words by Ayana Contreras, June 2022
Contact
Management
David Passick
David Passick Entertainment
dpassick@me.com
North America Booking
Chris Weller
Big Fish Booking Company
chris@bigfishbookingco.com