Makaya McCraven

“one of the leaders of jazz's new global vanguard"

Time Magazine

"Mr. McCraven's arrangements exhume a feeling of potential, a promise of communion"

The New York Times

"There is a reason why people can't stop talking about Makaya McCraven."

The Chicago Tribune

"one of the world's foremost jazz musicians"

Stereogum

"he's onto something vital and new"

NPR

Makaya McCraven is a beat scientist. The cutting-edge drummer, producer and sonic collagist is a multi-talented force whose inventive creative process & intuitive style of performance defy categorization.

Born in Paris, France in 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, McCraven was exposed to a broad range of music from a young age. At age 3, his family moved to the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, 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 played around the American Northeast, pinnacling in opening sets for the Wu-Tang Clan, Rhazel, Digable Planets, The Pharcyde, Mixmaster Mike, and The Wailers. McCraven stayed close to home (and his working band) to study music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but prioritized the development of his professional music career, never completing his degree.

In 2007, he made a move 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 ends (straight ahead & avant-garde) of Chicago’s jazz scene, by 2012 he had “established himself as one of the city’s most versatile and in-demand drummers” (Chicago Reader) taking regular sideman gigs for Bobby Broom, Corey Wilkes, Willie Pickens, Occidental Brothers, Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker and others.

His breakthrough album as a lead artist, In the Moment, was released via fledgling Chicago label International Anthem in January of 2015. The dramatic double LP statement was also McCraven’s coming-out as a producer, where he debuted his unique brand of “organic beat music” – defined by his process of recording live, fully improvised, exploratory ensemble performances, then editing & post-composing the recordings into concise & catchy song forms. “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. It was quickly named “Album of the Week” on BBC Radio by influential UK DJ Gilles Peterson. By the end of the year, it was a “Best of 2015” selection for The Los Angeles Times, Pop Matters, and NPR Music’s Critics Poll. In 2016, In The Moment was hailed by Turntable Lab as “one of the most important recordings to date in the modern Jazz world.”

The critical and communal reception to In The Moment launched him into the vanguard of not only internationally-known jazz artists, but also a niche genre of next-wave composer/producers blurring the boundaries of jazz & electronic music. And it led to greater breakthroughs in the live setting for McCraven, including a historic co-headlining Chicago performance with Kamasi Washington in Fall of 2015 and a major showing at the New York City Winter Jazz Festival in January of 2016 where he was named a “Top 5 Artist to Watch” by NPR and Billboard. Afterwards he signed with European booking agency Good Music Company and spent most of 2016 touring the European circuit.

McCraven went on to release his first DJ-style mixtape Highly Rare in 2017, produced from a single live performance at Danny’s Tavern in Chicago. It would later be hailed as one of the “Best Albums of 2017” by The New York Times. That same year, he began production on a second mixtape made from live recordings – this time captured in London at the legendary Total Refreshment Centre, where he improvised with an all-star cast of cats from the city’s bubbling jazz scene (incl. Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross, and Joe Armon-Jones). Just months after the Total Refreshment Centre showcase was nominated for “Live Experience of the Year” at UK’s JazzFM Awards, McCraven released the mixtape – titled Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape) – which featured his own production intertwined with remixes by other producers.

Between 2015-2017, McCraven toured nationally and internationally and produced 3 critically acclaimed releases as a lead artist. But performances and accolades aside, McCraven’s focus remained on creating music with the power to unify people. “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. Tethered by legacies of the past but looking towards a new, more universal future.” (makayamccraven.com)

Ruminations on home, identity and collectivism continued to culminate on McCraven’s subsequent releases. In October 2018, McCraven delivered the epic double LP Universal Beings via International Anthem. The expansive 91-minute work features McCraven’s signature post-production rub of live improvised recordings from 4 sessions in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles. Showcasing an A-list roster of emergent players from each of those creative hotbeds (including Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Anna Butterss, and Miguel- Atwood Ferguson), Universal Beings vaulted McCraven ever higher, making marks on dozens of year- end lists including The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times and Bandcamp.

In early 2019 XL Recordings founder Richard Russell contacted McCraven with an invitation to re- imagine Gil Scott-Heron’s haunting farewell transmission, I’m New Here, for the album’s 10th Anniversary. “I would never have gone out and looked for someone to do this record,” declared Russell. “If it wasn’t Makaya, it wasn't going to be anyone.” Centering around the raw and weary poetics of Scott-Heron’s 2010 vocal masters, McCraven invited longtime collaborators Brandee Younger, Junius Paul, Ben LaMar Gay and Jeff Parker to his home studio to recast the album with acoustic cuttings from “root sessions” and samples he culled from long out-of-print recordings by his parents. Released by XL in January 2020, We’re New Again is a vital bridge between two generations of Black American music that affectionately honors Scott-Heron’s profound legacy.

On July 31st, 2020, McCraven is set to release Universal Beings E&F Sides – a fourteen track addendum LP featuring unreleased “organic beat music” cut from the original Universal Beings sessions, but revisited and produced by McCraven to be a soundtrack for director Mark Pallman’s Universal Beings documentary film (which also releases on July 31st, 2020).