Makaya McCraven is a prolific drummer, composer and producer. An artist who has been aptly called a “cultural synthesizer,” McCraven 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 progressive music. According to the New York Times, “McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.”

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. 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.

McCraven says: “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’s 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 radio, 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 recorded in Chicago and New York, in addition to pop-up studio sessions recorded in London and Los Angeles, concretely reflects his open communal and artistic approach. The work featured varying configurations of 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 mounted a multimedia performance of an early iteration of what would eventually become his 2022 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. 

McCraven’s critically lauded album In These Times (released in 2022 by the three-label collaboration of International Anthem, Nonesuch, and XL Recordings) is a collection of orchestral, polytemporal progressive jazz compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as McCraven’s personal experience as a product of a multinational, working class musician community. It took McCraven 7+ years to create, as it slowly cooked in the background while his other works were released. He began recording In These Times in 2015, 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 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 arranging music, and the orchestral sound of In These Times.” It was appropriately called “McCraven’s most ambitious set of music” by GRAMMY .com, as the album managed to encompass all McCraven had lived through up to that point, as well as his lineage, while also pushing his music forward.

Passion of the Weiss suggests 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.”

In October 2025, McCraven released four new EPs - Techno Logic, The People’s Mixtape, Hidden Out!, and PopUp Shop - all of which are compiled on the 2xLP and 2xCD physical release Off the Record. The source material from each EP was drawn from moments of pure improvisation, recorded live in performance, shaped as much by the room and audience as by the musicians themselves. 

Techno Logic features Ben LaMar Gay and Theon Cross, and draws from performances in London (2017), Berlin (2024), and New York (2025), showcasing nearly eight years of developing rapport between the three musicians, starting with their very first session at Worldwide FM’s former North London studio.

The People’s Mixtape has its foundation in a live recording from Brooklyn’s Public Records in January of 2025, where McCraven celebrated the 10 year anniversary of In The Moment with an intentional return to the improvisational language he developed over that album’s sessions. For the occasion, McCraven played with bassist Junius Paul and trumpeter Marquis Hill (two musicians who are majorly present on In The Moment), as well as vibraphonist Joel Ross (who has been a regular collaborator of McCraven’s since the 2017 sessions for Universal Beings), and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu (marking the first occasion for McCraven to play with the SML co-leader and International Anthem labelmate).

Hidden Out! is built off recordings from McCraven’s June 2017 residency at The Hideout in Chicago, where he improvised weekly with a revolving cast including bassist Junius Paul, Tortoise member, International Anthem labelmate, composer and guitarist Jeff Parker, and SML co-leader, GRAMMY-award winning producer and alto saxophonist Josh Johnson.

PopUp Shop was created from recordings of McCraven’s Los Angeles debut at Del Monte Speakeasy in 2015, where McCraven took part in the King Hippo and Grown Kids Radio produced event RAWS:LA, and improvised with guitarist Jeff Parker, vibraphonist Justefan, and bassist Benjamin J. Shepherd.

McCraven will be on tour across the US, UK and EU for much of autumn 2025, and into 2026.