Drummer and jazz composer Makaya McCraven conjures a sound I’ve had in my head for many years, a kind of default private soundtrack that tends to flow in my mind’s ear when it’s not being stimulated from the outside. It’s a smooth, strongly syncopated groove music that hovers between acid jazz and instrumental hip-hop. Unbidden, it entertains or soothes me, especially when I’m walking or in transit. Now obviously, McCraven’s fully realized and extraordinary art is far more sophisticated and varied and beautiful than my simplistic mental beat-boxing. I’m just saying it’s a wild experience to discover a musician whose vision and art touches our own musical DNA. I’d usher this music into the world if I could. What a wonder to find someone who does it on my behalf. That said, I think there’s a strong chance you’ll love this too.
McCraven was born in Paris and grew up in Massachusetts in a household swirling with high-level jazz and international music. He was entertained as a boy by leaders from avant-garde music, including saxophonist Archie Shepp, with whom Makaya’s father played drums. His mother was a singer from Hungary who was a player in that country’s 1970s folk movement. So Makaya, who is now 38 and a celebrated leader in modern Chicago music, was perhaps born to be, if not play, a synthesizer.
Thing is, when we talk about musical synthesizers, we usually mean uniters of genres, and McCraven does that, but he goes a step further, unifying musical media and transgressing the roles of organic and electronic musicians. He applies techniques from free jazz and jamband with electronica in a way I’ve not seen before, and the results are sensational and serene. The bio identifies McCraven as “a beat scientist, cutting edge drummer, producer, and sonic collagist.” So to grasp that, think of the kind of producer who works on digital audio workstations that let them loop, combine, reverse, enhance, sample, cut, and splice as much as they like. Most artists who work in this medium produce for hip-hop, pop, dance and soundtrack arenas, which is to say studio-centric genres that are rarely played by live musicians. Sampling and remixing is of course integral to hip-hop, and those samples wind up on songs, albums and mix tapes, and they are triggered in live shows. Also, producers remix tracks by jazz artists, mining them for sounds and memes on their way to finished ambient instrumental music, and I’m a fan of this stuff.
What McCraven does, and I’m not saying he’s the first, just the first that I’ve encountered, is to remix his own performances as his main recorded output. He plays live with his band, leading prolonged impromptu jams. Then in the computer work station, he plays with those tracks, conceptually uprezzes them, with mixing techniques, beat-making and overdubs. It applies the crate-digger ethos of J Dilla, Madlib and DJ Shadow to his own creations. When we hear McCraven albums, including his breakout, 2015’s In The Moment or his celebrated breakthrough Universal Beings from late 2018, we’re not sure where the live jazz ends and the re-mix trip-hop begins.
In the early stages of In The Moment, a thickly viscous bass loop supports a shimmering cascade of vibes while McCraven’s shifty drumming slow walks us into a trance. There’s some decoration from Tony Barba’s saxophone and washes from the guitar of Jeff Parker. I’ve celebrated Parker before as a member of the amazing ambient jazz fusion band Tortoise. He and McCraven are close colleagues on the Chicago scene. On Universal Beings, each side of the double album is named for the city where its live tracks were laid down - Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and London - and throughout both of the albums I’ve mentioned, we can hear the crowd milling and chilling in the club, places I like to imagine lit by candles and swirling with cannabis smoke. This is music that will appeal deeply I think to any fan of the newly hot Austin groove rock trio Khruangbin, but McCraven brings more nuance, more syncopation and more timbral thrills. His cymbal playing alone is reason to cue this all up on a great stereo or your mobile, because as I suggested before, this is excellent walking music.
McCraven’s newest project Deciphering The Message, released in November 2021, finds him applying his sound chemist artistry to classic jazz tracks. Blue Note Records has a history of entrusting select catalog recordings to DJs and producers to see what they might make out of them. I picked up the double LP of Blue Note Revisited years ago and just love it, with its remixes by a variety of producers of songs by Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, Horace Silver and more. Where that album gave the artists one or two tracks, McCraven remixes 13 songs here, and it’s a comfortable but stimulating ride from front to back. He lays in archival tape of the voice of legendary Birdland emcee Pee Wee Marquette over the opening Hank Mobley remix “A Slice Of The Top,” lending some pomp and humor to the slugging beats and magisterial horns. Silver’s 1952 track “Ecaroh” is gently enhanced with trip-hop overlays. Quincy Jones, who doesn’t get enough credit for his vast jazz career, loans McCraven the post bop track “Wail Bait” as played by trumpeter Clifford Brown for a 21st century rethink. McCraven seems to love the vibes as much as I do, and he leans into Bobby Hutcherson’s “Tranquility” for the prettiest cut.
A tradition-bound jazz fan might get hives over this blurring of modalities, and even I’m surprised that live music can be cut up, looped and rearranged so seamlessly. God bless cross-fades and quantizing I guess. But this would all be academic if the music of Makaya McCraven wasn’t so moving and challenging and novel.