‘A love of music, culture and community’
Makaya McCraven set to delight Cartagena Jazz Festival with his sonic sorcery
MAKAYA McCraven is described as beat scientist. The cutting edge drummer, producer, and sonic collagist is a multi-talented force whose inventive creative process and intuitive style of performance defy categorisation.
Called ‘a sound visionary’ by jazzinchicago.org, who is ‘not your everyday jazz drummer’ (thewordisbond.com), McCraven brilliantly moves between genres and pushes the boundaries of jazz and rhythm to create forms of his own.
“You are listening to one incredible musician. His style and sound is unique, a heady, skilful, sophisticated and boldly uncompromising mix of jazz and hip hop...” said Damien Wilkes in his five-star, UK Vibe review of McCraven’s latest release Universal Beings.
The breakthrough album though was In the Moment, which was released in January 2015 and was promptly awarded Album of the Week status by BBC Radio 6 Music’s influential DJ, Gilles Peterson.
At the end of the year it appeared on ‘best of 2015’ listings for the Los Angeles Times, Pop Matters, NPR Music’s Jazz Critics Poll, and Apple Music.
In 2016, it was hailed by the online music shop Turntable Lab, as ‘one of the most important recordings to date in the modern jazz world.’
The album was a dramatic statement by McCraven, where he debuted a unique brand of ‘organic beat music’ that quickly launched him into the vanguard of not only internationally-known jazz artists, but also a niche genre of nextwave composer-producers blurring the boundaries of jazz and electronic music.
“While Teo Macero’s work with Miles (Davis) might seem the obvious reference point, In The Moment is closer in spirit to Madlib and J Dilla,” said WIRE magazine.
Born in Paris, France in 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven (Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp) and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, McCraven was exposed to a broad range of influences from a young age. At age three, in 1986 his family moved to the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachussetts, a time and place that afforded him the mentorship of his parents’ community of friends and collaborators, which included jazz luminaries Marion Brown, Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef.
His earliest gig memories include playing alongside students in his father’s drum ensemble, the CMSS Bashers, at age five and in middle school forming a band with friends to back up his mother’s Jewish folk songs. In high school, McCraven co-founded Cold Duck Complex, a jazz hip hop band that developed a strong following in the American Northeast, opening for acts like Wu-Tang Clan, Rhazel, Digable Planets, The Pharcyde, Mixmaster Mike, and The Wailers.
During this period he studied music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but prioritised the development of his professional music career, and never completed the degree.
In 2007, McCraven moved to Chicago, where he immersed himself in the city’s gigging and creative music scenes. Through years of hard work and deepening kinships with artists from both the ‘straight ahead and avant garde’ ends of Chicago’s jazz spectrum, by 2012 he had established himself as one of the city’s most versatile and in-demand drummers, doing regular sideman gigs for Bobby Broom, Corey Wilkes, Willie Pickens, Occidental Brothers, Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, and others. And by January of 2015, he had recorded and released In The Moment.
The acclaim that In The Moment received led to greater breakthroughs, including a co-headlining Chicago performance with Kamasi Washington in the autumn of 2015 and a slot at the New York City Winter Jazz Festival in January of 2016.
At the festival he was named a Top 5 Artist to Watch by both NPR and Billboard, and garnered glowing reviews from the Wall Street Journal, New
York Times, and Downbeat Magazine.
Following this, he spent most of 2016 touring the European circuit, capped off by a performance at the London Jazz Festival, which was broadcast live on Boiler Room TV.
McCraven went on to put out his first mixtape, Highly Rare in 2017. The set was produced from a live performance in Chicago, and eventually hailed as one of the Best Albums of 2017 by The New York Times.
In the same year he began production on a second mixtape made from live recordings captured at a two-night showcase in London, where Makaya performed with artists from the UK jazz scene.
Just months later, the showcase was nominated for Live Experience of the Year by UK’s Jazz FM awards, Makaya released the mixtape – Where We Come From (Chicago x London Mixtape), which featured his own production intertwined with remixes by other producers.
In Will Schube’s words in his Passion of the Weiss feature: “Makaya McCraven is a Chicago staple, owing some of his rise to the city’s fervent jazz community, but with Where We Come From, McCraven and his band have transcended locale. Jazz belongs to the world, it exists wherever we come from.”
Despite the performances and accolades, McCraven’s focus remains on both creating music and moving the culture forward.
“As a person of mixed race, nationality, and ethnicity I want my identity and contributions to paint a world not bound by genre, race or national boundaries but unified through a love of music, culture and community,” he said.
Tethered by legacies of the past The most recent release Universal Beings, was recorded over four sessions in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles, and features ‘new’ jazz players from those cities, such as BrandeeYounger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, NubyaGarcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niñoand Miguel-Atwood Ferguson.
Cutting edge and new jazz music fans should already be aware of Makaya McCraven, if not give him a Spotify, it is all there to revel in.
When McCraven’s beatscientistry bites, snaffle tickets for his performance at the Cartagena Jazz Festival on November 8. Also on the bill are the British jazz renegades Sons of Kemet.
For further information and tickets visit https://jazz.cartagena.es/2019
Oh what a night.