MAKAYA McCRAVEN
(Booking in North America)
PROJECTS:
MAKAYA McCRAVEN
3-7piece band (lineup varies)
MAKAYA McCRAVEN: IN THESE TIMES (Special Project)
A large-scale (10-13piece ensemble) sociopolitical-themed performance commissioned by the Walker Art Center that draws from jazz, poly rhythms, mixed meters, orchestral music, hip hop, and soul. Includes a string quartet.
TOUR:
2025 - Available upon request
2026 - Available upon request
** = Special Large-scale presentation of Makaya McCraven: In These Times
NEW ALBUM:
COMPOSED AND PRODUCED OVER THE PAST 7 YEARS, IN THESE TIMES IS MAKAYA’S MOST AMBITIOUS AND PERSONAL ALBUM TO DATE. CO-RELEASED BY INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM, NONESUCH, AND XL RECORDINGS ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2022.
YEAR END MENTIONS:
Pitchfork has included In These Times at # 18 on their 50 Best Albums of 2022
Two New York Times mentions (Best of Jazz + Honorable mention in overall Best of) for In These Times
Los Angeles Times has included “The Fours” in their “100 Best Songs of 2022” at # 24 (perfect suture between heady jazz and electronic precision.)
Treblezine included “Dream Another” in their “100 Best Tracks of 2022” at # 90
The Line of Best Fit have named the album #31 in their roundup of “The Best Albums of 2022 Ranked.”
In These Times has been pinned #12 in Loud & Quiet’s roundup of Best Albums of 2022
Uncut have named “In These Times” one of their top 50 ‘Albums of 2022’.
Resident Advisor has picked “In These Times” as one of their favourite albums this month.
Bandcamp include In These Times on their Best Albums of 2022
“For the last few years, Makaya McCraven has produced some of the most unique and exhilarating work in contemporary jazz…Full of powerful musical ideas and tight playing, In These Times is one of the most exciting contributions to jazz in 2022”
NPR, Sheldon Pearce included In These Times in his Top 20 Albums of 2022
Stereogum included In These Times in their “50 Best Albums of 2022” at # 37
On In These Times, the Chicago-based “beat scientist” plays with rhythm in ways that recall Dilla’s innovations, unlocking tempos from their gridlines, and splicing and sampling his own instrumentation in real time, inverting the live performance of jazz into something more ambiguous but no less alive. As with Dilla, you feel in your body McCraven’s mastery before you can understand it on a technical level. It’s demanding music that generously demands nothing of you. —Pranav Trewn
HIGHLIGHT PRESS:
“In These Times is one of McCraven’s most ambitious sets of music” - GRAMMY.com
“With In These Times, McCraven has raised his art to a new level.” - Bandcamp
“In These Times is a reminder of McCraven’s prowess as a producer and composer” - WBGO
“In These Times is a sumptuous record that really cements Makaya McCraven’s place at the vanguard of worldwide jazz” - Loud & Quiet
“A musical marvel made by meticulous process” - NPR
“It's deeper and more lush than anything he’s done to date…This is a beautiful, beautiful record.”” - Stereogum
“…but as formidable as McCraven’s catalog has already become, it’s true. In These Times feels like his big statement. It delivers.” - Stereogum, Album of the Week
“There’s not a unified sound that runs through Makaya McCraven’s music so much as an overall ambitious vision” - Treblezine
“In These Times is another striking example of McCraven’s search for an organic-but-modern sound. Much like Miles Davis’ many experiments in genre and production, McCraven is uncompromisingly adventurous but never alienating” - Treblezine
“It's fueled by boundless creativity, just like the classic jazz records of the '50s and '60s and '70s were, and you don't have to be a seasoned jazz head to be swept away by its infectious grooves and hypnotic melodies.” - Brooklyn Vegan
“Where his breakthrough LPs deftly shaped improvisations into compositions, In These Times reverses the trick - adding textural depth and layer upon layer of intrigue to McCraven’s emotionally-charged meditations on life and identity. Given half a chance, its enchanted moods and nimble funambulist swagger could convert even the most jazz-cautious listener” - MOJO
“Truly, this music sends sparks cascading in all directions.” - Exclaim!
“In These Times is an excellent new chapter in this evolution.” - All Music
“this is one of McCraven’s most accomplished albums to date, playing to his strengths as a sample-based thinker and collage artist while also showing how he can wrestle his micro-moments into long-form works.” - Flood Magazine
“In These Times is like oxygen in the very lungs of jazz, and McCraven’s rhythms like its heartbeat.” - Paste Magazine
“the percussionist’s new record serves as a reflection on McCraven’s growth as a musician.” - Pitchfork
“Over the last five or six years, drummer Makaya McCraven has migrated from the enlightened margins of the modern-jazz mainstream to someplace near its pulsing center, while earning the sort of outside acclaim reserved for the hippest forms of crossover.” - WBGO
NPR on In These Times: “a self-contained musical world brimming with rhythmic complexity and dynamic variability, but approachable from every angle”
“Makaya McCraven is making singular jazz music that continues to advance textures and compositional possibilities.” - San Francisco Chronicle
"Drum & bass, jazz and hip-hop collide on an LP of beautiful compositions that highlight the non-stop evolution of Black music ... Fusing classical and symphonic awareness, Here, the blues are forever swinging, either by harmonic grace or within the framework of instrumental hip-hop." - Resident Advisor
VIDEOS:
BIO:
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
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