SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2020
VOLUME NINE NUMBER ONE
BRIAN BLADE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
SULLIVAN FORTNER
Makaya McCraven
(b. October 19, 1983)
Artist Biography by Thom Jurek
McCraven was born in Paris, France in 1983, the son of jazz drummer Stephen McCraven (Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp) and Hungarian folk singer Agnes Zsigmondi. As a child, his family relocated to Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley, an area that Shepp and Yusef Lateef called home. Shepp and Lateef helped his parents mentor the boy by exposing him to a broad range of musical traditions. He began playing drums before he was ten, and in high school he pursued music studies seriously. His Cold Duck Complex cut three albums and toured regionally in the opening slot for hip-hop acts, and was a favorite at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Matriculating there, McCraven furthered his studies and played in the University Jazz Orchestra.
He relocated to Chicago in 2006 and almost instantly became an integral part of its thriving music scene, working with musicians ranging from Ari Brown and Broom to Corey Wilkes and Henry Johnson. He told Chicago Magazine that his reason for relocating to the Windy City was predicated by "...a tradition in Chicago that’s not stuck in the same trends as a place like New York. Chicago has a tradition of subversive music, and that, to me, is really intriguing, especially today, in times of political resistance. The tradition of a lot of Chicago music is one of resistance or labor or oppression and corruption." The drummer established his bona fides by playing on recordings by Apollo Sunshine and Kris Delmhorst.
McCraven revisited the leftover material from Universal Beings. He was seeking music to complete director Mark Pallman''s documentary film on the album's creation, the global tour, and the drummer's overall musical approach. McCraven discovered unused tracks offering the same level of inspired creativity displayed on the previously released outing. Using the new tapes from those concerts as source material, he added studio edits and fresh overdubs, resulting in the album In the Moment E/F Sides. International Anthem issued it as a stand-alone release during the summer of 2020.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/makayamccraven
Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven is a beat scientist. The cutting edge drummer, producer, and sonic collagist is a multi-talented force whose inventive process & intuitive style of performance defy categorization.
Called “a sound visionary” (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, skillful, sophisticated and boldly uncompromising mix of jazz and hip hop…” (UK Vibe)
His breakthrough album In the Moment was released with International Anthem Recording Co. (IARC) in January of 2015 and quickly named “Album of the Week” on BBC 6 Radio by influential DJ Gilles Peterson. By the end of the year it was a “Best of 2015” selection for Los Angeles Times, Pop Matters, NPR Music’s Jazz Critics Poll, and Apple Music. In 2016, In The Moment was hailed by Turntable Lab as “one of the most important recordings to date in the modern Jazz world.” In The Moment 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 next-wave composer-producers blurring the boundaries of jazz & 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.” (WIRE Magazine)
French-born but raised in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts by expatriate musician parents, McCraven went on to develop his chops in Chicago and now represents a rising generation of globally-minded, genre-bending music makers as an artist as well as band leader. Through his unique, rarified performances and collaborations he unapologetically affirms our right to re-think and re-write the rules, any rules, and affirms other artists in their own exploratory evolutions.
“No longer are we seeing jazz musicians experimenting with a new genre (hip hop) that they find interesting (or vice versa). Now what we’re seeing are jazz musicians who were heavily influenced by hip hop in their most formative years, just as much as they were influenced by jazz or any other genre. This creates a different kind of music. These cats aren’t ‘blending’ jazz and hip hop; for them, these genres are inseparable. They can’t play one without playing the other.” (thewordisbond.com)
Born in Paris, France in 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven (Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp) and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, McCraven was exposed to broad ranges of influences from a young age. At age 3, 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 backup his mother’s Jewish folk songs. In high school, McCraven cofounded 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.
“I grew up studying jazz as a way to be masterful at my craft as a drummer. But as a young person, I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Nas, and Biggie just like everybody else. That was just our generation.” (Chicago Magazine)
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, and never completed his degree (although he was part of the University Jazz Orchestra and earned various Downbeat student awards). In 2007 he made a move to Chicago, where he immersed himself in the city’s gigging and creative music scenes. He took on as many gigs as he could, whether small, big, or bizarre, and gave music workshops to students from elementary to university level. While music has been in his blood from a young age, he’s been steadily humble & hungry, sure to always be distilling his various learnings and influences into an identity and groove of his own.
“People think music is just a gift and it’s born out of nothing — that it’s in your genes. No: Musicians work hard. You practice for hours and hours and hours. For me, with my parents being musicians, it wasn’t that they genetically bestowed on me the gift of music, but that they were willing to let me put many, many hours of my life into it.” (In These Times)
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) doing regular sideman gigs for Bobby Broom, Corey Wilkes, Willie Pickens, Occidental Brothers, Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, and others. All the while he’d been developing a new kind of statement with the announcement and release of his leader debut Split Decision (Chicago Sessions, 2012), about which Dan Bilawsky wrote:
“This is no take on standards with sparkling cocktail party élan or loose, amorphous three-way conversation. This is music made by a 21st century man who sees no need to suppress his hip hop chops or rock spirit in an effort to fit in and be dubbed a jazz drummer. McCraven marries his love for music other than jazz with a more jazz-oriented spirit built around in-the-moment, improvisational cunning and driving grooves throughout this program of original music.” (All About Jazz)
Imbued with a new confidence, McCraven began work with IARC, performing alongside Marquis Hill & Matt Ulery twice as part of their “Trio in Curio” series. The shows’ success prompted a new IARC collaboration at The Bedford with McCraven at the helm as artist-in-residence. The new series, called “Spontaneous Composition”, was an incubator for McCraven to improvise with new collaborators weekly and develop concepts for an unnamed future album. From January 2013 to early 2014, every session of the series was recorded for reference, but rather than merely reviewing the improvisations for compositional inspiration, McCraven began tinkering with the stereo mixes in Ableton, doing what he referred to as “fixing” the music – editing, looping, pitching, layering, and ultimately producing the tracks that were released on his 2015 breakthrough album In The Moment (IARC).
The critical and communal reception of In The Moment 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 both NPR and Billboard, and garnered glowing reviews from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Downbeat Magazine. Afterwards he signed with European booking agency Good Music Company and spent most of 2016 touring the European circuit, capped off by a London Jazz Festival set broadcast live on Boiler Room TV in November of 2016.
Right upon returning from that London show, McCraven did a special Chicago performance at Danny’s Tavern in support of touring Belgian DJ LeFtO. Joined by fellow Chicago-based IARC artists Junius Paul, Nick Mazzarella, and Ben LaMar Gay, McCraven captured an inspired set of high-energy improvisation to 4-track tape, and used those recordings to post-produce and create his first DJ-style mixtape Highly Rare (IARC). Originally released cassette only, the lo-fi free-jazz-meets-hip-hop mixtape eventually made it onto vinyl & digital formats, and at the end of the year was lauded as one of the “Best Albums of 2017” by The New York Times, UK’s EZH Mag, and Gilles Peterson, in addition to highly favorable reviews by PASTE Magazine, Stereogum, and Pitchfork.
The latter end of McCraven’s 2017 was also highlighted by an October stint in London, where he headlined IARC’s ‘CHICAGOxLONDON’ showcase, and over the course of two nights improvised, performed & recorded with a handful of leading-edge UK-based musicians (including Joe Armon-Jones, Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Soweto Kinch, and Kamaal Williams). The recordings from those shows made source material for another mixtape that McCraven would produce and release on IARC in June of 2018, called Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape). In the words of Will Schube, for his feature in Passion of the Weiss:
“While Where We Come From follows in the footsteps of McCraven’s previous releases, he moves far outside his Chicago circle on the release, taking a performance from London in October 2017 and using it as the structure from which he builds the tape… The result is unlike anything else coming out of the Chicago jazz or rap scene, an exploration of the different iterations jazz has introduced globally, and how these sounds are more similar than we often realize. 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.”
McCraven has toured nationally and internationally, and produced 4 critically acclaimed releases as a lead artist in the last 4 years. Yet 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. Tethered by legacies of the past but looking towards a new, more universal future.”
Makaya McCraven continues the development of his “organic beat music” as well as the work of (what Schube described as) “transcending locale” on his most recent release Universal Beings. A 2xLP album that was recorded at 4 sessions in New York, Chicago, London & Los Angeles, Universal Beings features an A-list of “new” jazz players from those hotbed cities: Brandee Younger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niño and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/arts/music/makaya-mccraven-universal-beings.html
The New Vanguard
Makaya McCraven Sees the Future of Jazz Through Layers of History
On a rainy evening in August of last year, a barely advertised show by the Chicago-based drummer and beatsmith Makaya McCraven jammed an overflow crowd into H0L0, a sparse little basement club in Ridgewood, Queens. His band was a group of New York musicians, some of whom Mr. McCraven had hardly played with before; what they performed was entirely improvised, but with Mr. McCraven subtly steering, listeners had room to get comfortable, to fall into the music. His thick snare drum splattered against the bulb tones of Joel Ross’s vibraphone patterns, making an elliptical groove. Sometimes Brandee Younger’s plucks on the harp led Mr. McCraven into a buoyant, driving beat. Elsewhere, he minimized himself, letting Dezron Douglas’s bass guide the rhythm.
Like many of Mr. McCraven’s shows, the night was recorded, providing raw material for “Universal Beings,” an album he released in October to wide acclaim. Since his second record, “In the Moment,” in 2015, Mr. McCraven has put out a string of albums and mixtapes that amount to a proof of concept. Each one features crudely recorded live improvisations that he has sliced up, pared down and spritzed with effects and extra instrumentals. Part concert bootleg, part hip-hop mixtape, his music — borne of a process rather than a compositional method — has the potential to open up the way musicians think about improvisation.
“Something that I feel is severely missing in jazz is a connection to the aural tradition — it not just being on the page,” Mr. McCraven said in a phone interview this week.
His ability to wrap his albums in the dark allure of a club show, the timeless texture of an old Folkways record and the sonic layering of a hip-hop producer has turned Mr. McCraven, 35, into the most discussed young musician on a Chicago jazz scene teeming with fresh energy. “In the Moment” was just the second release on International Anthem, a jazz-and-more label that has since become a clearinghouse for innovative Chicago music. “Universal Beings” — a double album culled from live performances in four cities, each featuring prominent young local musicians — is the label’s first release to turn a real profit.
“This feels like it’s a culmination for us as much as it’s a culmination for him,” said Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder.
Mr. McCraven was raised thinking about music as a binding agent. Born in Paris to Ágnes Zsigmondi, a Hungarian singer and flutist, and Stephen McCraven, an African-American jazz drummer and educator, he was raised in and around Northampton, Mass., an artistically rich area.
Before his mother left Hungary, her best known work had been with Kolinda, a band blending folk traditions from across Eastern Europe in a tacit rejection of political strictures. “They mixed Eastern European music from the larger region — so Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Gypsy music, Jewish music — at a time when a lot of borders were being redrawn by war, and a lot of these cultures were talked about as being separated and not having similar roots,” Mr. McCraven said.
As a youngster, he often heard his father playing with the saxophonist Archie Shepp (a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master) and Gnawa musicians from northwestern Africa, as well as with Senegalese performers. “That’s a huge influence on me,” Mr. McCraven said, “jazz being part of a folk music.”
By the time he graduated from high school, Mr. McCraven was already touring around the Northeast with Cold Duck Complex, a jam band-cum-hip-hop group that became popular on college campuses. He spent a number of years in and out of the music program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, constantly pulled away by opportunities to perform and record. He became the musical director at the Pushkin, a small performance space in nearby Greenfield, Mass., which led to an open-door policy at the venue’s studio.
On record, Cold Duck Complex struggled to achieve the sound that reflected the warmth of classic hip-hop samples. “Why is it that when my band tries to learn that hip-hop track, it doesn’t come out the same?” he remembered wondering.
“Later I kind of got into dub reggae, and heard the studio being used as an instrument in that way, which also connected to my love of sample-based hip-hop, and made me ask how that music was being produced,” Mr. McCraven added, name-checking Jamaican producers such as Lee (Scratch) Perry and King Tubby.
He realized that most hip-hop samples come from music that was recorded on analog tape, without sophisticated equipment. When he moved to Chicago in 2006 to join his girlfriend (now wife), Nitasha Tamar Sharma, who had been hired at Northwestern University, he started working with musicians across the worlds of jazz, experimental and African music. He played African-derived music on the creative edge alongside members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and in the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, and felt himself edging closer to a raw, direct sound.
As a result of his wide-ranging work, the music he makes now (recorded with just two room microphones, not the instrument miking that is industry standard) has layers of history built into it. You can hear the spiritual-jazz influences of Idris Muhammad and Lonnie Liston Smith, the clatter of Gnawa percussion, and the ecumenism of hip-hop producers across generations: DJ Premier, Madlib, Knxwledge.
Mr. McCraven began experimenting with the music that would become “In the Moment” five years ago, after seeing the virtuoso guitarist Jeff Parker playing freely improvised sets alongside a D.J. at a Chicago bar. Mr. McNiece was booking shows at the time, and asked Mr. McCraven to start a residency at the Bedford, a restaurant near Noble Square.
Mr. McCraven’s groups — which consistently featured leading Chicagoan improvisers like Mr. Parker, the trumpeter Marquis Hill and the bassist Junius Paul — played experimental, groove-based music in front of small crowds. As a result the music on “In the Moment” feels open and unencumbered; ambient bar conversations often dance across the tracks.
Mr. McNiece remembered being immediately struck by Mr. McCraven’s ability to unite musicians and audiences around a fresh style. “Makaya was the first one who, in a free-jazz context, was bold enough to play something with a backbeat — something that actually made people physically respond a little bit,” he said.
“Highly Rare,” from 2017, was recorded to four-track cassette during a performance at a different bar, just days after President Trump’s election. It has a different vibe, largely thanks to the circumstances: This music shivers and crackles, teetering on an edge. The alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella’s long tones, sometimes run through a harmonizer, are unnerving, rather than providing balance.
Mr. McCraven hopes to keep introducing his communal, improvisational process to new contexts. He sees “Universal Beings” as the start of a transnational exploration; his sights are set on making similar recordings in Africa soon.
And he’d like to do something similar at home. He thinks the young buskers playing street percussion on buckets around Chicago ought to get to know each other, possibly by improvising together. “They all have similar licks and a similar vocabulary, and I know some of them are in different neighborhoods or different crews and gangs,” he said, adding that he’d like to organize a way for them to be paid to perform together.
“I’m really interested in how the language has gotten passed around. Where do these licks come from? What’s the history? Who are the elders? Where have they learned it? How do the styles and things travel around the city, just like every aural tradition?”
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of Makaya McCraven’s upcoming New York concert. It is Sunday, not Saturday.
Articles in this series examine jazz musicians who are helping reshape the art form, often beyond the glare of the spotlight.
Makaya McCraven
Performs at Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday at 8 p.m.; lpr.com.
Makaya McCraven showcases jazz's bright contemporary scenes throughout Universal Beings
by Leor Galil @imLeor
At 35, Chicago jazz drummer, producer, and bandleader Makaya McCraven possesses the wisdom of a musician twice his age. In a July interview with Passion of the Weiss, McCraven shared the reason why he decided to record his new Universal Beings (International Anthem) in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles. “Each scene has its own vibe and its own energy, but I'm also trying to tell a larger story about how we're all part of an international, global art scene,” McCraven said. “In this particular moment, there's an interesting movement in jazz where it's being redefined by young players and new audiences.” McCraven is one of those young players, and he’s using lessons and techniques from hip-hop, cumbia, funk, and strains of electronic music to build a bright path for the future of jazz while honoring its legacy. The music on Universal Beings comes from four improvised sessions—two from live sets at venues, two from private studios—with different combinations of collaborators, the cellist and composer Tomeka Reid is the only contributor who played in two sessions (New York and Chicago). As he has on his previous releases, McCraven edited down the live material to create the final album. The wide-ranging, immersive Universal Beings has so much going for it that I’m still grasping all its details, but because I go hard for the local scene I’ve taken a particular interest in the suite of songs McCraven has dubbed “Chicago Side," recorded at Bridgeport venue Co-Prosperity Sphere in 2017—McCraven’s playing is bolstered by his symbiotic relationship with bassist Junius Paul. Reid and tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings ratchet up anxiety and provide a sense of relief on the sprawling, nervy “Atlantic Black,” and build a mystical harmony around McCraven’s boom-bap-inflected drumming on “Inner Flight.” For tonight’s debut ensemble performance, McCraven enlisted nine of the musicians who appeared on Universal Beings, including Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, harpist Brandee Younger, and tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia. v
https://www.makayamccraven.com/about/
About Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven is a beat scientist. The cutting edge drummer, producer, and sonic collagist is a multi-talented force whose inventive process & intuitive style of performance defy categorization.
Called “a sound visionary” (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, skillful, sophisticated and boldly uncompromising mix of jazz and hip hop…” (UK Vibe)
His breakthrough album In the Moment was released with International Anthem Recording Co. (IARC) in January of 2015 and quickly named “Album of the Week” on BBC 6 Radio by influential DJ Gilles Peterson. By the end of the year it was a “Best of 2015” selection for Los Angeles Times, Pop Matters, NPR Music’s Jazz Critics Poll, and Apple Music. In 2016, In The Moment was hailed by Turntable Lab as “one of the most important recordings to date in the modern Jazz world.” In The Moment 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 next-wave composer-producers blurring the boundaries of jazz & 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.” (WIRE Magazine)
French-born but raised in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts by expatriate musician parents, McCraven went on to develop his chops in Chicago and now represents a rising generation of globally-minded, genre-bending music makers as an artist as well as band leader. Through his unique, rarified performances and collaborations he unapologetically affirms our right to re-think and re-write the rules, any rules, and affirms other artists in their own exploratory evolutions.
In The Moment, Makaya McCraven (International Anthem, 2015)
“No longer are we seeing jazz musicians experimenting with a new genre (hip hop) that they find interesting (or vice versa). Now what we’re seeing are jazz musicians who were heavily influenced by hip hop in their most formative years, just as much as they were influenced by jazz or any other genre. This creates a different kind of music. These cats aren’t ‘blending’ jazz and hip hop; for them, these genres are inseparable. They can’t play one without playing the other.” (thewordisbond.com)
Born in Paris, France in 1983 to jazz drummer Stephen McCraven (Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp) and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, McCraven was exposed to broad ranges of influences from a young age. At age 3, 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 backup his mother’s Jewish folk songs. In high school, McCraven cofounded 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.
“I grew up studying jazz as a way to be masterful at my craft as a drummer. But as a young person, I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Nas, and Biggie just like everybody else. That was just our generation.” (Chicago Magazine)
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, and never completed his degree (although he was part of the University Jazz Orchestra and earned various Downbeat student awards). In 2007 he made a move to Chicago, where he immersed himself in the city’s gigging and creative music scenes. He took on as many gigs as he could, whether small, big, or bizarre, and gave music workshops to students from elementary to university level. While music has been in his blood from a young age, he’s been steadily humble & hungry, sure to always be distilling his various learnings and influences into an identity and groove of his own.
“People think music is just a gift and it’s born out of nothing — that it’s in your genes. No: Musicians work hard. You practice for hours and hours and hours. For me, with my parents being musicians, it wasn’t that they genetically bestowed on me the gift of music, but that they were willing to let me put many, many hours of my life into it.” (In These Times)
Split Decision, Makaya McCraven (2012)
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) doing regular sideman gigs for Bobby Broom, Corey Wilkes, Willie Pickens, Occidental Brothers, Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, and others. All the while he’d been developing a new kind of statement with the announcement and release of his leader debut Split Decision (Chicago Sessions, 2012), about which Dan Bilawsky wrote:
“This is no take on standards with sparkling cocktail party élan or loose, amorphous three-way conversation. This is music made by a 21st century man who sees no need to suppress his hip hop chops or rock spirit in an effort to fit in and be dubbed a jazz drummer. McCraven marries his love for music other than jazz with a more jazz-oriented spirit built around in-the-moment, improvisational cunning and driving grooves throughout this program of original music.” (All About Jazz)
Imbued with a new confidence, McCraven began work with IARC, performing alongside Marquis Hill & Matt Ulery twice as part of their “Trio in Curio” series. The shows’ success prompted a new IARC collaboration at The Bedford with McCraven at the helm as artist-in-residence. The new series, called “Spontaneous Composition”, was an incubator for McCraven to improvise with new collaborators weekly and develop concepts for an unnamed future album. From January 2013 to early 2014, every session of the series was recorded for reference, but rather than merely reviewing the improvisations for compositional inspiration, McCraven began tinkering with the stereo mixes in Ableton, doing what he referred to as “fixing” the music – editing, looping, pitching, layering, and ultimately producing the tracks that were released on his 2015 breakthrough album In The Moment (IARC).
The critical and communal reception of In The Moment 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 both NPR and Billboard, and garnered glowing reviews from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Downbeat Magazine. Afterwards he signed with European booking agency Good Music Company and spent most of 2016 touring the European circuit, capped off by a London Jazz Festival set broadcast live on Boiler Room TV in November of 2016.
Highly Rare, Makaya McCraven (International Anthem, 2016)
Right upon returning from that London show, McCraven did a special Chicago performance at Danny’s Tavern in support of touring Belgian DJ LeFtO. Joined by fellow Chicago-based IARC artists Junius Paul, Nick Mazzarella, and Ben LaMar Gay, McCraven captured an inspired set of high-energy improvisation to 4-track tape, and used those recordings to post-produce and create his first DJ-style mixtape Highly Rare (IARC). Originally released cassette only, the lo-fi free-jazz-meets-hip-hop mixtape eventually made it onto vinyl & digital formats, and at the end of the year was lauded as one of the “Best Albums of 2017” by The New York Times, UK’s EZH Mag, and Gilles Peterson, in addition to highly favorable reviews by PASTE Magazine, Stereogum, and Pitchfork.
The latter end of McCraven’s 2017 was also highlighted by an October stint in London, where he headlined IARC’s ‘CHICAGOxLONDON’ showcase, and over the course of two nights improvised, performed & recorded with a handful of leading-edge UK-based musicians (including Joe Armon-Jones, Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Soweto Kinch, and Kamaal Williams). The recordings from those shows made source material for another mixtape that McCraven would produce and release on IARC in June of 2018, called Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape). In the words of Will Schube, for his feature in Passion of the Weiss:
Where We Come From, Makaya McCraven (International Anthem, 2018)
“While Where We Come From follows in the footsteps of McCraven’s previous releases, he moves far outside his Chicago circle on the release, taking a performance from London in October 2017 and using it as the structure from which he builds the tape… The result is unlike anything else coming out of the Chicago jazz or rap scene, an exploration of the different iterations jazz has introduced globally, and how these sounds are more similar than we often realize. 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.”
McCraven has toured nationally and internationally, and produced 4 critically acclaimed releases as a lead artist in the last 4 years. Yet 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. Tethered by legacies of the past but looking towards a new, more universal future.”
Makaya McCraven continues the development of his “organic beat music” as well as the work of (what Schube described as) “transcending locale” on his most recent release Universal Beings. A 2xLP album that was recorded at 4 sessions in New York, Chicago, London & Los Angeles, Universal Beings features an A-list of “new” jazz players from those hotbed cities: Brandee Younger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niño and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson.
https://downbeat.com/news/detail/makaya-mccraven-makes-the-old-new-again
Makaya McCraven Makes The Old New Again
by James Porter I April 24, 2020
Drummer and producer Makaya McCraven revamps Gil Scott-Heron on We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven (XL). (Photo: Leslie Kirchhoff)
Chicago’s Makaya McCraven is best known as a drummer and producer, mixing and matching genres until they blend as one. While he admits that hip-hop has played a major role in his musical development, marrying it to a jazz aesthetic took some time, coalescing on 2018’s Universal Beings.
His latest album, We’re New Again: A Reimagining By Makaya McCraven (XL), is another kind of pastiche. And this time, the producer’s source material is Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here, the vocalist and poet’s final studio effort from 2010. Oddly enough, though, it’s already been remixed once: Jamie XX worked over the project back in 2011, the year that the politically poignant Scott-Heron passed away.
While McCraven’s recent albums have centered on remixing his own live recordings, this was the first project where he’d reimagined another performer’s full-length.
“I didn’t choose the record. The record chose me,” McCraven said about the 10-year-old Scott-Heron album. “I was approached by Richard Russell, who produced the original record with Gil. He asked me to do a remix project of sorts. I was surprised and honored to be considered.”
With a bit of resequencing and the addition of new production around Scott-Heron’s ragged voice crooning harsh lyrics, McCraven managed to summon avant-garde sounds perfectly suited to the project.
I’m New Here—the source material a meeting of spoken word and gruff singing layered atop beat music—almost sounds like a remix project itself. But McCraven rebuilt the music, somehow managing to maintain the original’s essence. A prime example is “New York Is Killing Me,” which was startling enough in its original version. In McCraven’s take, added electronics build a city the singer wishes he could leave.
The producer was taken by “the age in [Scott-Heron’s] voice and [the] references to going back home and coming full circle with your whole life—the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “That struck me, as an artist trying to survive, bringing positivity to the world through work. Gil Scott-Heron represented being honest and provocative. That being his last statement, it was something powerful in itself.”
While McCraven acknowledges the impact of sample-based music on his own albums, he frequently looks further back for inspiration: “Les Paul and the use of a tape machine, and the Beatles overdubbing on four-tracks; I find that using recordings and repurposing sound is fascinating and can be done in a variety of ways.”
But to hear McCraven tell it, there was no real blueprint for We’re New Again.
“I used a variety of techniques. I don’t know if I’ve got a recipe, but I’ve got a recipe book,” he said. “The way I approach music in general is as a creative endeavor, something where I’m searching and learning and experimenting. I enjoy utilizing the studio as a tool to create music. The recording space is a separate sonic universe than the live space. Something that [guitarist] Jeff Parker told me one time: For him, a record isn’t just a document of what happened, but it’s also something entirely of itself. I really like that sentiment. When I produce music, that’s kind of where I’m at. When presented with something that’s wild, I try to utilize a variety of techniques, putting something of myself into it.”
For all of his investment in technology, McCraven avoids any contemporary sonic trappings that might make We’re New Again sound dated in a few years’ time.
“The purpose here is to make compelling art,” he said, “paying homage to the past and looking towards the future.”
With his reinterpretation of Scott-Heron’s final album, McCraven manages to do that, while also giving listeners a new twist on an album that was unpredictable to begin with. DB
https://www.redbull.com/us-en/music/events/makaya-mccravens-universal-beings
https://www.passionweiss.com/2018/07/02/makaya-mccraven-interview/
An Interview with Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven speaks like a jazz musician plays. His ideas dart and run astray, his thoughts pick up speed as he gets excited about a particular line of thinking. But when it clicks, when what he’s hinting at coheres and locks in, you know exactly where he’s going. McCraven’s familiarity with the genre—its vernacular, its pacing, its varying styles—was bred in him from an infantile age. McCraven was born in Paris, the son of a Hungarian woman who played traditional folk music and an ex-pat father who played drums for Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers. The couple embedded themselves in Parisian jazz culture before moving to Western Massachusetts where Shepp settled and Yusef Lateef called home. Those two would mentor Makaya from an early age, introducing him to a jazz language the young student would eventually morph into an inspired personal sound.
While McCraven honed his childhood chops just outside of Boston, he came into his own as a professional player a dozen years ago when he moved to Chicago. The timing was fortuitous. This was ‘06, the scene was bubbling. The co-mingling between experimental rock and free-form jazz was audacious and prevalent, the sort of genre defiance McCraven has mastered as his calling card. After a few years of moving around the scene with various musicians—playing as a drummer rather than a collaborator—McCraven stepped into the spotlight with the show stealing In the Moment. The record was put out on International Anthem during the label’s big come up, and McCraven’s grown with it—Chicago jazz pretty much runs through International Anthem in 2018. In the Moment features other Chicago staples Jeff Parker (who now resides in LA) and Joshua Abrams, and is the first example of McCraven’s pioneering cut and paste technique.
In the Moment, last year’s Highly Rare, and the just released Where We Come From, blend the live performative aspects of improvisational jazz with McCraven’s proclivities as a producer, blending and looping the best bits with his unique drum style and hip-hop embedded swagger he spent his childhood studying.
While Where We Come From follows in the footsteps of McCraven’s previous releases, he moves far outside his Chicago circle on the release, taking a performance from London in October 2017 and using it as the structure from which he builds the tape. Kamaal Williams is featured on keys, as is Joe Armon-Jones, and the result is an endlessly grooving tape that spans the ever evolving expanse of rap production and exotic strains of jazz’s historic roots.
After recording that performance, McCraven handed the record to a number of producers to chop, splice, and remix, including another Chicago jazz luminary, Ben LaMar Gay. From there, McCraven took the recordings back, once again imbuing them with his signature sense of rhythm and feel. The result is unlike anything else coming out of the Chicago jazz or rap scene, an exploration of the different iterations jazz has introduced globally, and how these sounds are more similar than we often realize. 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. —Will Schube
How did the idea to make this mixtape come into being?
Makaya McCraven: A lot of it stems from the discovery of the process of being in the moment. After going through that and extrapolating that to Highly Rare and improvised shows that I would document, I moved onto sampling as a method of composition. After Highly Rare, I wanted to do it as a traveling project. I wanted to do sessions in New York, LA, Chicago, and London. It was an idea of doing more things like this, eventually hoping to travel around different regions of Africa and South America as well.
The idea came from extrapolating what I’ve been doing and taking it into a broader concept. The early stuff was focusing on a localized music scene. A lot of people ask me about Chicago, but I’m not really from Chicago. I’ve been here for twelve years. I’ve been able to come here as a transplant and embed myself in a localized music scene, but I’ve also been playing different music, involved in different scenes—LA and London—that offer interesting takes both locally and globally. As a way of both celebrating local music in a place like Chicago, that doesn’t get the same type of love and appreciation New York and LA get, and shine a light on it, but I also don’t want to beat my chest in celebrating Chicago’s scene, because my real fans and friends in Chicago, they’ll remind me that I’m not actually from there! I’m just trying to celebrate the idea of local music scenes and local cultures.
Each scene has its own vibe and its own
energy, but I’m also trying to tell a larger story about how we’re all
part of an international, global art scene. In this particular moment,
there’s an interesting movement in jazz where it’s being redefined by
young players and new audiences. This new record is a combination of
expanding my process and selfishly wanting to travel and play with new
people—to test my musicality and grow and learn from as many of my peers
as I can. I also just want to shine a light on jazz, both locally and
internationally. This particular London show took on a life of its own
and that’s how this particular project came about.
Is your writing process now exclusively made up of that improvisation and splicing method?
Makaya McCraven: That’s one way I go about songwriting. I have a studio record that I’ve been working on as well but this took precedent because of the momentum and the narrative we’ve been building regarding the process. One thing I really enjoy, too, is the improvised concerts. They’re unique experiences and it’s a time when we can get together. Ideally, I’d like to put them in non-traditional venues where they’re a little more accessible to the public and a little more low pressure than a concert hall or a festival stage. I’m trying to create an interesting space where creative musicians can simply express themselves, I’m trying to create an environment that’s free. For the audience, too, I think there’s something unique about it, something exhilarating about improvised music and that journey. There’s something really unique about the first moment a new idea comes together. That moment when everybody clicks in is something special and something I want to investigate and document.
On studio recordings, I’m not
necessarily interested in documenting improvisation. I don’t think it’s
the right place for that. With those, I’m using beat making ideas to
bring certain pieces together. In one way, I’m composing, but it’s more
about the entire process, it’s about creating communities and
interesting experiences that take us beyond where we’re used to being. A
lot of music today is very quantized and perfectly played. One thing
that I love about jazz and improvisation is that it’s about the unknown.
At the same time, I spend most of my time, chopping this stuff up on my
computer or sitting behind a piano or with a bass, composing and
writing. I’m just trying to grow as a musician. It’s all part of the
process of my growth towards mastery of the craft. This is a challenge
and about the process of growing a sustainable career as an artist which
is nearly impossible.
Was your idea originally to take these
live recordings and then give it to producers to chop up and remix
before handing it back to you for more additions?
Makaya McCraven: In the Moment
was a series of performances which we’d record, and then I’d chop it up
and pass it along to producers. From there, I try to weave it all
together which adds to the mixtape vibe as well. Also, it exemplifies
what I’m trying to make in terms of samples, sounds, and repurposing
ideas—recontextualizing music to make new music. I’ve always been really
drawn to sample based hip-hop, and that was my first love in the genre.
Just trying to figure out how producers create samples. The idea that I
can create something, and then I can recontextualize that music and
make something new, then pass that piece to another person, and then
they can take something new out of that same live audio, and then that
person can pass that back to me and I can flip it again. From that whole
process, we had four different pieces of music all coming from the same
catalyst. I’m just trying to investigate what’s possible.
What’s your idea of the difference between a mixtape and an LP?
Makaya McCraven: I think a mixtape generally has more voices in there, as opposed to just one artist. With Where We Come From, it really jumps around from the life of the performance, to a mix from a producer, to another artist, so instead of it feeling like an album as a set of songs or a narrative, it takes a couple different directions and it’s mixed up from different sounds and different perspectives. Also, it’s like a continuous play. You’re basically listening to a DJ weaving music together rather than a song starting and ending. It’s curated for you with transitions and it plays smoothly through.
That’s what I felt with Highly Rare,
too. Also, we literally put this record on tapes! This is my mix, this
is featuring all of the transitions. It’s from the perspective of a DJ.
How did you go about recruiting the live group that made up the Where We Come From performance?
Makaya McCraven: I wasn’t entirely familiar with the musicians I was playing with. I had been in touch with Kamaal Williams a few times before. In London, we were talked about in similar press around that time. We had some mutual connections that were interested in seeing us collaborate. It didn’t come through the time before so I saw this as a good opportunity to reach out and pull him into something. I was familiar with most of their music, but I hadn’t met most of them, I knew loosely of the scene from Sons of Kemet. It was more brainstorming, like, after I knew I had people like Shabaka [Hutchings] involved, I was just searching for people that would be interesting for the movement. It was a little bit like, ‘Who knows how this is gonna go?,’ because I didn’t really know them or their playing that intimately. But it turned out great and I think I really made some connections that will last a long time.
There’s a lot of talk about the London scene, but I feel like I can get together with these musicians halfway across the world without ever really talking about it, and we can create something beautiful together, something powerful, especially when the world is telling us we should be apart based on our nationalities or race. I was born in Paris, my mother is from Hungary, my dad was an ex-pat living in Paris. Going overseas to play with musicians is full circle and part of my life story. I’m not just pulling it out of thin air, either.
My father was 21 when he moved to Paris, he integrated with the French jazz scene. Archie Shepp was living there. I’ve always looked to my parents as inspirations. A big part of this project is traveling to get a better sense of my history. We need more of this now. We’re trying to be divided and othered. It’s not that crazy of an idea to go overseas and play with other musicians. It’s pretty simple. Music is much more powerful than the borders that divide us. If it wasn’t, musicians wouldn’t be traveling on tour. You would just listen to the people outside of your door. I meet musicians from all over the world because we’re all playing the same festivals, we’re all hanging backstage.
I’ve always wanted to play with as many musicians as I can, across as many differences—racially, ethnically, geographically, in terms of genre—as possible. There are blues musicians I can sit in with and play circles around technically, but if I can’t play their music with authenticity and make it feel right, then I’m defeated. I want to be informed and educated in a cultural sense. I would like to be able to sit down anywhere in the world with any band and be able to hold my own.
When you’re playing with this group of
British musicians, are you conscious of the way your style of jazz
varies from their music? Are you trying to alter your style to get
closer to their sound, or are you trying to see how these two different
worlds can potentially co-exist?
Makaya McCraven: I would argue that our styles aren’t so different. It’s not so clear how different American and British versions of jazz are. I would say that, because of those groups of players having a long history specific to their scene, they maybe understand each other better. Part of me wants to take part of that, but part of me also wants to challenge that. I’m a musician that wants to play with people, I like to listen and respond. Hopefully the musicians I’m playing with feel the same way, in which case we’ll all meet somewhere.
It’s not pure improvisation, though—we’re not avoiding things that are more familiar sounding. Also, the type of show we’re doing will drastically affect the way we play. If we did Highly Rare in a tavern, we’ll go in a more out there direction, but I’ll always try to bring it back. We did Where We Come From in a bigger room, so it had more of a standing room rock show feel. The circumstances add a lot to the music, it’s not just about the musicians. The fact that we’re playing a song in front of a lot of people who are very hyped and have a lot of energy, means we’re going to be excited, I’m going to play the drums louder, I’m going to look for more extraordinary grooves. We’re not isolated, the audience is there, too. I can’t stress enough that the music would be completely different without the audience. We’re going to give back what they give us.
I really like when I hear somebody hooting or hollering, which I really like to loop once or twice after the fact. It gives a little window to the set, and it’s funny to hear somebody yelling along to the music. ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ Even mistakes and little weird moments provide better loops than a really tight sounding band. That’s the best thing about sampling from improvised source material. You have all of these little nuggets, unbelievable moments that would be impossible to write or come up with. It’s chance. Chance is a motherfucker. When little things happen that are hard to dream up, there’s more to pull from. That’s what’s beautiful about improvisation.
One of the only thing that remains true
in this world is that chaos exists. We all improvise, but as jazz
musicians, we’re just navigating the unexpected. Everybody does this in
their everyday lives. We have schedules, but if there’s a traffic jam
you’ve gotta improvise. We do our best to compartmentalize and organize
everything so we can minimize the unknown, but no matter how much
structure we build, we still have to improvise.
Before you moved to Chicago where were you based out of?
Makaya McCraven: I was based out of Western Massachusetts. There was a vibrant jazz scene there, my father moved there from Paris and Archie Shepp was teaching at UMass. Yusef Lateef lived there, too. There are all sorts of interesting people because there are five colleges out there. It was a small, rural area but it was a really liberal, forward thinking art community. A lot of really great careers emerged out of that community. When I moved to Chicago I felt like a small fish in a big pond because of the success I had in Massachusetts. I kind of had to start over. I was playing in hip-hop bands and on folk sessions on the East Coast but when I moved to Chicago I started doing straight ahead jazz and that began to take over.
But there was a period where I was a full time musician but I was making beats as a hobby. I was trying to sell beats to emcees and that sort of stuff, but it’s not like anyone was interested in a Herbie Hancock-style beat I made. That was really disheartening for me. But being a player and a producer sort of met up, and I was able to do both. It was really inspiring to realize I could do both. That was big because as a young musician, you weren’t supposed to be a jazz player. If someone asked, you were supposed to say that you played all kinds of music. Jazz was a bad word. The prospect of having a sustainable career went out the window, but jazz was accepted wherever I lived. I haven’t had a real job since I was 18 years old. I’m a full-time working musician. In Chicago that means I’m very working class, but I get to tour the world.
Now, the narrative of the record is about all of these really young jazz musicians who are doing really well, but there’s not really a budding audience for it. That is something I really want to tap into. I just want to reach a larger audience and be a positive influence. I want to reach as many people as I can. I love hip-hop and I love beats and I find that that style has a platform, but finding a place where my jazz music finds that audience—where I can pay homage to my father’s music, who was playing with avant-garde jazz legends—to show we can create some sort of life, some sort of antithesis to all the negative shit we’re dealing with in this world. Art is important and the rest of the shit we have to deal with sucks. Art matters.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/working-40-jazz-musicianJazz Musician: ‘I See the Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots’
by Jeremy Gantz
June 16, 2014
As a working musician, Chicago-based drummer Makaya McCraven says 'one day you're the guest of honor, the next day you're a peasant.' (Peter Holderness)
For three years in the early 1970s, journalist Studs Terkel gathered stories from a variety of American workers. He then compiled them into Working, an oral-history collection that went on to become a classic. Four decades after its publication, Working is more relevant than ever. Terkel, who regularly contributed to In These Times, once wrote, “I know the good fight — the fight for democracy, for civil rights, for the rights of workers — has a future, for these values will live on in the pages of In These Times.” In honor of that sentiment and of Working’s40th anniversary, ITT writers have invited a broad range of American workers to describe what they do, in their own words. More “Working at 40” stories can be found here.
Bud Freeman, a tenor saxophone player for 47 years, spoke to Terkel for Working about the shock he frequently encountered when he told strangers he played music for a living. Though he admitted to frequently sleeping in until noon, he also told Terkel about the discipline required to foster musical creativity while surviving as a full-time musician — as he said, “The dream of all jazz artists is to have enough time to think about their work and play and to develop.”
As the son of an African-American jazz drummer and a Hungarian vocalist, from his earliest years Chicago-based drummer Makaya McCraven saw up close how hard professional musicians had to work. Because of this, he says, “I’m not disillusioned about the life I’ve chosen.”
McCraven, who moved to Chicago from Massachusetts in 2006, has played some of Chicago’s biggest stages, toured the United States and Europe, and recorded albums with various bands, including his own. He played his first paying gig at age 12; now 30, he has been a full-time musician for nearly a decade. Today, McCraven experiences the frustrating paradox facing all musicians trying to earn a living: though music is more ubiquitous than ever, consumers are less willing to pay for what they hear. Even so, he says, glamorous stereotypes persist. This interview has been abridged and edited.
People think we just jam out and get free drinks. Some people think we’re not working, because they don’t think about how much you have to practice, the amount of work it takes to play your instrument well.
People think music is just a gift and it’s born out of nothing — that it’s in your genes. No: Musicians work hard. You practice for hours and hours and hours. For me, with my parents being musicians, it wasn’t that they genetically bestowed on me the gift of music, but that they were willing to let me put many, many hours of my life into it.
Now, I can be working with 10 to 12 bands at a time, and it’s a lot of music to learn. You have to do your homework; you can’t just show up to the show without learning the music first. So there’s a lot of work that I do at home.
And then there’s business side: the scheduling of tour dates, the work to get more work, the emailing, the back-and-forth, travel arrangements, all the logistics that go behind it. You don’t have a team of assistants doing that for you unless you’re pulling in a good, considerable amount of money. And then those people end up making more money than the musicians!
My wife will sometimes say to me, “You work all the time.” It’s a nighttime business, so I can get a text about a gig anytime from eight in the morning to two or three in the morning. You try to respond to people quickly because they might be calling a lot of people at once. There are a lot of ups and downs. Just because you have a great gig or you’re successful for a moment, that doesn’t mean you have any sort of security, because there’s no retirement or anything.
There are a lot of different ways of going about making a career in music. You can be in a band, which is risky because a lot of bands aren’t making much money — you’re working for money brought in at the door. You’re waiting for the big break.
Then there’s the working musician method, where you refuse to play for under a certain amount but you approach it as labor: You’re going to play a gig at a hotel and you’ll be in the corner, for example. When the gig’s over, you’re done. That’s very different from the idea of being in a band.
What I’ve learned during my time in the industry is to diversify my income and to be proactive. If you’re waiting for some big artist to give you a call with a life-changing opportunity, or if you’re the band waiting for the big break, you’ll keep on waiting.
But if you’re constantly trying to create opportunities for yourself, it’s very possible to have a career in music. You don’t even necessarily have to be that great, unfortunately, if you’ve got good business skills.
There are two sides to it, for me. One is, what am I doing as an artist? Am I creating my own product to sell, to become known and draw people to my shows? The other important side is becoming known by other musicians as someone who’s reliable, as someone who can play the music well and show up on time — you want to be professional and to not cause any rifts.
Has the record industry’s collapse impacted your career?
I’ve never had a livelihood that was based off of record sales — the only people who made lots of money off of records were selling huge numbers. But one of the things I see in the music industry now is the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the disappearing middle class of musicians.
These days, big labels put a lot of money into promoting big-name artists whom they know will sell. In doing so, they’ve taken more and more money out of artist development. So you have fewer mid-level artists who are signed and making a living.
We’ve seen a lot of industries for working musicians disappear. The advertising industry once provided a lot of work for musicians. Now ad songs can be easily done by one person at a computer.
And then you see, with regular local gigs, that the pay scale hasn’t changed in 30 years. These older guys, they used to make good money playing a jingle in the studio before going to play a club gig that night. They got paid the same rate that I’m getting paid to play. So you can see how tough it can be — the cost of living has changed.
Part of it is younger musicians who are not as talented accepting less money for gigs. They just want to play to get their name out there. I understand that, but it hurts the industry.
But part of it also has to do with culture — people don’t really care about the music in a certain type of venue, or how high-quality it is. So lots of gig rates are too low.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about the working life of a musician?
There are so many. Say I meet somebody in an airplane. First question I get is usually, “Oh, do you play in a band? My nephew’s in a band.” I’m thought of as someone who practices in a garage and plays a show a few times a month or something. After I explain, they’re always surprised, like, “Wow, you do that all the time, like, that’s your job? You don’t have any real work? What’s your day job?” So the big misconception is that being a musician is like a hobby.
And then there are a lot of people who think music is about being famous, or trying to get famous.
The truth is that there’s such a wide range of things that people do within the industry beyond club shows and concerts: teaching, performing as a session person, being an engineer, or working as a wedding band or a corporate group. In Chicago there are a lot of what are known as “corporate bands” — a company has five or six bands that they run and hire out to perform for certain clientele, for conventions or corporations throwing parties. The company handles the business side. They can charge a lot of money and pay the musicians pretty well.
I sometimes tell people that if you’ve ever been somewhere that there’s been live music, I’ve done that. I’ve played in some very big shows: in small arenas, as an opener for big artists on several occasions or at large festivals. But I’ve also done weddings and restaurants; I’ve played on a movie set. I’ve been in the studio for commercials, for records and for recording classes with guys learning to engineer. I’ve also taught: I’ve done workshops at universities, high schools, elementary schools and performed for students. I’ve played at an airport before — that was a weird episode.
I played a funeral one time. It was definitely strange playing an emotional event for strangers. I had never been to an open-casket funeral before. And I wasn’t really aware it was a funeral before I took the gig: Sometimes you don’t ask enough questions when someone calls offering the gig and you need the work. And then you’re playing six feet behind a casket looking out at family and friends mourning. I definitely didn’t smile during that gig.
Are you still able to enter a creative “zone” when you sit down and begin playing at most gigs?
I make that a goal of mine. If you start doing too many straight work gigs, then you can lose the creative spirit. At corporate band gigs, for example, there can be a lot of extraneous noise to deal with, and people saying you’re playing too loud. Those gigs aren’t for being creative, they’re for being wallpaper. That’s why I really prefer not to do those kind of gigs. I only do them to fill my schedule, to keep me busy and bring in more money.
Luckily, because I invest so much time into creative projects and have created my own unique voice, I don’t necessarily get called as much for that stuff anymore.
Is it hard to juggle a mix of corporate gigs and your own bands playing original music?
It can be surreal. I’ve had that: the experience of playing a big festival in Chicago in front of five or six thousand people — maybe more — with all the food you can eat and back massages backstage. Then I get off stage and gotta rush downtown for a gig that’s going to pay me just as much as the festival paid me. But the accommodations and perceptions are completely different: It will be a private residence for, like, the 65th birthday party of the brother of a news anchor or whatever, and you have to ask the doorman to let you unload equipment in the back. You play but can’t mingle. You’re heard but not seen.
So you have to code-switch a lot. One day you’re the guest of honor, the next day you’re a peasant.
What’s the key to making it on your terms?
You have got to work hard. It pays to have a creative outlook and entrepreneurial approach because nobody knows what’s going to happen with the music industry. Like I said, the middle class of musicians is shrinking. But at the same time, the Internet provides certain avenues for independent artists. Of course, it’s hard to compete with the major labels, because they have the Internet too! They have the Internet and they have the money, the marketing muscle — the capital.
So how do you create a decent life as a working musician? I really think it’s about being an original artist: create a body of work and be hired for being you, rather than just being a musician for hire.
You have to constantly create, collaborate with people and diversify the work. By doing that, I’ve been able to stay busy and avoid things I’d rather not do. Some musicians would rather have a day job and only do exactly what they want to do. But I look at it as a livelihood.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeremy Gantz is a contributing editor at the magazine. He is the editor of The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People (2017, Verso), and was the Web/Associate Editor of In These Times from 2008 to 2012.
https://djbooth.net/features/2020-02-12-makaya-mccraven-interview-gil-scott-heron-were-new-again
Makaya McCraven Brings Gil Scott-Heron Back Home
Photo Credit: Eddie Otchere
“Moments of great emotion never die.” —Dr. C.O Simpkins
A great number of emotions are embedded in the voice of Gil Scott-Heron, a Chicago-born and New York-buried writer of many mediums, none more venerable than when Heron spoke and sung the words he wrote. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the late activist, author, and performer came of relative fame by singing of calamities swelling in America’s underbelly as a critic and poet, a rapper and bluesman—an observant survivor of the times.
Gil Scott-Heron’s last album, I’m New Here, was released by British label XL Records in 2010, six months before Heron’s untimely passing. Recorded in 2008, I’m New Here was produced entirely by XL label head Richard Russell, who, in 2005, sent a letter to the living legend asking if he wanted to make an album. Heron, at the time, was imprisoned in Rikers Island for violating his parole from a previous drug possession arrest.
Before Heron’s incarceration, The New York Times published a story with the headline, “A Ravaged Musical Prodigy At a Crossroads With Drugs,” which covered his felony possession of cocaine case. The story details the complicated history and lasting effects of Heron’s drug addiction on his family, friends, and his career.
Richard Russell didn’t believe Heron was ravaged. Russell sought him out; they made a record. It would be Gil Scott-Heron’s final record before his 2011 passing. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of I’m New Here, Russell enlisted the assistance of Makaya McCraven, 35, a prestigious Chicago-born drummer, producer, and sonic collagist, to remix the world he and Heron built together.
“The first thing I heard from Makaya is this song called ‘Above and Beyond,’ which is on his record Highly Rare,” Russell told me earlier this month. “It’s one of Makaya’s chopped up instrumentals, and I just loved how hip-hop it was.”
When asked about how long the process took to put together the newly released, We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, Russell replied, “How long did Makaya spend on doing it? That’s a good question. Have you spoken to him yet? He was living it.”
I spoke with McCraven a few days later, over the phone. “I heard from a little birdy I might get an email,” he says. He received an email from that very same birdy that detailed a pitch about a posthumous remix project. “It was kind of, whoa, this is Gil Scott-Heron,” he said, aware the name carried the gravity of importance. A legacy name.
Richard Russell didn’t believe Heron was ravaged. Russell sought him out; they made a record. It would be Gil Scott-Heron’s final record before his 2011 passing. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of I’m New Here, Russell enlisted the assistance of Makaya McCraven, 35, a prestigious Chicago-born drummer, producer, and sonic collagist, to remix the world he and Heron built together.
“The first thing I heard from Makaya is this song called ‘Above and Beyond,’ which is on his record Highly Rare,” Russell told me earlier this month. “It’s one of Makaya’s chopped up instrumentals, and I just loved how hip-hop it was.”
When asked about how long the process took to put together the newly released, We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, Russell replied, “How long did Makaya spend on doing it? That’s a good question. Have you spoken to him yet? He was living it.”
I spoke with McCraven a few days later, over the phone. “I heard from a little birdy I might get an email,” he says. He received an email from that very same birdy that detailed a pitch about a posthumous remix project. “It was kind of, whoa, this is Gil Scott-Heron,” he said, aware the name carried the gravity of importance. A legacy name.
“The clarion call of that once potent voice is now a lazy slur, and rather than turning his formerly piercing gaze on recent events that seem like new chapters in his life-long novel—from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the election of President Obama—Scott-Heron turns inward for bland philosophizing and surprisingly hollow personal reflections.”
William Layman of Pop Matters echoed a similar criticism:
“The songs are philosophical and personal rather than social or political, yet they don’t feel powerfully real. Scott-Heron’s voice fleetingly recaptures its pliant soul, but it mainly grumbles and crackles with time.”
Neither critic is wrong for pressing play on a Gil Scott-Heron album and expecting the man who declared, in 1971, “Home is where the hatred is.” They expected a burning world to rejuvenate him. But that’s not who Gil Scott-Heron was anymore; those weren’t the words he wished to speak.
I’m New Here is about Scott-Heron’s truth, not the world’s problems. The album is bare with that truth, the skeletal honesty of looking at a body underneath an X-ray. When Gil Scott sings, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go,” on the Richard Russell-produced “Me and the Devil,” it sounds literal. Every word on the album feels pure as if every vowel and consonant is pouring from a fever dream.
We’re New Again brings the pure voice of Gil Scott-Heron back home to a realm of sounds that’s electric, percussive, and rhythmic. Unlike Russell, who stripped the sound from around Gil’s voice to allow his pensive words to marinate upon the bone marrow of the listener, McCraven surrounds the spoken-word philosopher with lively chord progressions, head-nodding breakbeats, and bursting colors of improvisation. It’s an album that moves to a beat that reminds me of the jazz-driven sporadicity of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, but more weighty, a sense of foreboding terror that’s closer to the Kendrick on DAMN.
Just listen to McCraven’s rendition of “Blessed Parents,” where Heron’s voice is surrounded by erupting horns as he speaks of ancestral spirits like a wisdom-passing elder. And “This Can’t Be Real,” a gentle singing number that melts his baritone voice in the rhythm of a breakbeat fit for hip-hop’s grandfather.
Makaya McCraven made a legacy album in time with the legacy of the artist. McCraven never forgot who Gil Scott-Heron was, didn’t reimagine him as someone he wasn’t.
“The longer I worked on it, the more I was like damn, what did I get myself wrapped into? He has such a legacy as an artist, as a political activist, as a trailblazer and innovator in all sorts of music; hip-hop and jazz, funk, soul. As a poet, he did and said some iconic things.”—Makaya McCraven
We’re New Again considers both past and present, the living and the dead. Gil Scott-Heron wasn’t a ravaged man. He was a prodigy, one who deserves a be current in every era. Remixed, reimagined, resurrected. Not because he spoke only of the universal revolutions, but the inner-revolution, the one we all will fight until our dying days. By capturing those emotions, he’ll always have words—heavy words—that resonate. Makaya McCraven carried those heavy words, and the heavy legacy of a heavy artist, a task he recognized.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/makaya-mccraven-interview-reimagining-gil-scott-herons-final-album/
Makaya McCraven is not a man of many words—at least when it comes to making music. The Chicago percussionist and producer typically creates his sprawling instrumentals by getting his closest collaborators together for improvised live sessions, then splices the recordings into vibrant collages of jazz passages and hip-hop beats. So when McCraven was asked by XL Recordings head Richard Russell to rework I’m New Here, the final album by spoken-word icon Gil Scott-Heron, part of the challenge was more or less spelled out. “Instrumental music gives a really nice platform to communicate beyond the literal word,” he tells me. “But it does lack in the literal side of the word.”
When we meet in early January, McCraven is in New York for Winter Jazzfest, where he’ll perform selections from the project, called We’re New Again (out February 7). “I’m having a little bit of trouble about like, who’s going to be Gil’s voice [live],” McCraven says. “It’s kind of a weird thing—at first I didn’t want to use too much audio because I didn’t want to make this a hologram show.”
Whether onstage or in the studio, adapting I’m New Here has been a daunting task for McCraven. Released roughly a year and a half before Gil Scott-Heron’s death in 2011, it has become one of the proto-rap legend’s most beloved albums—so much so that it has been reinterpreted once already, by a dancefloor-minded Jamie xx. “Emotionally, this was one of the more challenging records I’ve done,” McCraven says. “It was hard to work on something with somebody who’s not here. It’s not like I could call up Gil and say, ‘Hey man, what do you think about this?’”
McCraven also felt the pressure for more personal reasons: Scott-Heron’s music had loomed large in his own upbringing. Though his jazz-drummer father Stephen never collaborated with Scott-Heron, the two ran in somewhat similar circles. The elder McCraven worked with Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and other members of the radical spoken-word group the Last Poets, who were close contemporaries to Scott-Heron. His most famous recording, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” was a direct response to the Last Poets’ 1970 track “When the Revolution Comes.”
“My dad wears all black leather still, lives in Paris, worked with [jazz legends like] Archie Shepp and all these evocative black voices—really took part in the same movement in time,” says McCraven. “I definitely remember, from a young age, even before I could associate Gil with his voice, hearing his voice, and ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’ [Making this record] felt like bringing me home to my childhood, and that small apartment, with those records playing.”
To help him achieve that level of intimacy, McCraven enlisted trusted collaborators like guitarist Jeff Parker, trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay, harpist Brandee Younger, and bassist Junius Paul, all of whom have played on McCraven’s last few records. “Those are my people,” he says. “I like to work within my close, comfortable place—I like the vulnerability of it, the familyhood of the people I work with. I wanted all of that to be part of the record.”
Family, whether found or inherited, became the focus of We’re New Again. It’s a theme Scott-Heron explored and McCraven expanded upon, in part, by sampling recordings of his father drumming and his mother playing the recorder. “Gil, on this record, is really introspecting on his life,” McCraven says. “I connected it to my family.” Scott-Heron’s original LP is bookended by a two-part composition about his childhood called “On Coming From a Broken Home.” McCraven splits those into four pieces strung across We’re New Again, carrying the theme through like an artery shuttling blood cells.
Elsewhere, McCraven rearranged tracks to fit the thematic elements of Scott-Heron’s lyrics, letting content inform composition. On “New York Is Killing Me,” McCraven focused on the line, “I need to go home and take it slow in Jackson, Tennessee.” To translate the sentiment, he asked Gay to bring his diddley bow—a guitar-like, single-string American folk instrument—to the studio for a “down-home kind of vibe.” McCraven wanted to reinforce Scott-Heron’s word, but he also wanted to differentiate from the ultra-contemporary, electronic finish of the original. “I like to sample organic music,” he says, adding that I’m New Here sounds, in a way, like it’s already been remixed.
McCraven abstained from listening to the original, as well as Jamie xx’s We’re New Here, while developing We’re New Again. Instead, he focused on Scott-Heron’s isolated vocal tracks. “I wanted to come to this through the word, and not through what happened before,” he says. “I wanted to listen to Gil’s voice, have some context of those other records, but really focus on him.” While We’re New Here can feel like a Jamie xx record featuring Gil Scott-Heron, McCraven’s spacious arrangements are in close conversation with the original work.
When I mention to McCraven that he’s achieved this without making the project about himself, he seems slightly taken aback. “It definitely wasn’t my intention to make it about me,” he says. “It is about Gil.” He then pauses for a moment. “It’s interesting having to do interviews around this record, because a lot of it is his ideas and concepts. I just tried to support it with music and do something that connected with me. So I guess I did want to make it about me, you know? But not in an ostentatious type of way. I wanted to make it about me in the sense that this is my interpretation… whether it’s digging back to old childhood recordings I listened to with my dad, or just putting a lot of time into it.”
At Winter Jazzfest the next day, McCraven settles into his drum kit and the stage fills with musicians, including We’re New Again collaborators like Paul and Younger. Early on, a handful of players form a tight circle at center stage. They smile and nod to each other with a sense of warmth and familiarity, and it almost feels like we’re spying on some intimate living room jam. Slivers of Scott-Heron’s lyrics are broadcast over the ensemble. At times, a word or phrase hangs in the air before dissolving away, leaving McCraven and co. to communicate beyond the literal word.
https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/makaya-mccraven-beat-scientist/
Artists
Makaya McCraven: The Beat Scientist
Drummer, ‘beat scientist’ and multi-instrumentalist Makaya McCraven is sitting outside his home in Chicago, reflecting on his lockdown through the medium of Zoom. “I took a really hearty pause from doing music-related things except for taking some guitar lessons and giving my kids some music lessons,” he says. “I wasn’t really working on anything for the first time in a long time. I’ve always had a bunch of projects on my plate and looming deadlines.”
There is a lot of music, and there always has been. He was born in Paris to musician parents – Hungarian folk singer Ágnes Zsigmondi and jazz drummer Stephen McCraven – raised in Massachusetts and developed his unique style in Chicago, fusing classically-trained and internationally-acclaimed drum skills with a sample-based approach to production.
The breakthrough came in 2015 with In The Moment on Chicago’s International Anthem Recording Co. It took live recordings and put them through his Ableton process in a way that bridged jazz and beatmaking producer culture. McCraven is closely associated with the label, which in keeping with the city’s friends and family vibe released his acclaimed albums Highly Rare, Universal Beings and Where We Come From (ChicagoxLondon Mixtape). Last month they released Universal Beings E&F Sides on vinyl and as a new documentary. And if that wasn’t enough, this year, XL released We’re New Again, which brought his reimagining of Gil Scott-Heron’s We’re New Here a decade after its original release.
Excerpt from UNIVERSAL BEINGS – a new documentary on Makaya McCraven
Lockdown created a pause which is now being filled with new music. Specifically that means chopping and remaking his new In These Times suite in Ableton Live, and layering tracks using elements from these disparate times and places. The source music was recorded in studio sessions 2016-2020; from an intimate performance at In These Times’ magazine office in Chicago in September 2019; and from shows at the Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis, from the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago and from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Centre.
The Symphony Centre show took place just before the pandemic began to make its presence felt. It also featured archival film footage of Black musicians and activists and spoken word taken from oral historian Studs Terkel – who contributed to the progressive magazine that gave the music its title. The results will be released on International Anthem in 2021. “My lockdown has had ups and downs,” he says, “but I got a lot to be grateful for. Now I’ve been back to producing a lot. Finding that pause gave me some clarity on paths to finish the music.”
You’re a renowned jazz drummer and producer, and you bring both sides to your work. If you look back, whose path are you following?
I was a drummer who always wanted to produce records. Where I see the mixture is in the creative use of the studio. The record and the live experience are separate spaces. Recorded music is only relatively new – a hundred years ago you’d have to get the sheet music to someone who had some proficiency in an instrument. That has culturally changed with the recorded idiom, from tape loops and Les Paul to the Beatles to the drum machine to sample-based music, it’s all part of a continuum. I saw a video of Oscar Peterson playing synthesizers. I see that as a question: how are we using sound and what are the different ways you can use sound to create music and things of infinite joy? You can do that in the live realm or the recorded space. Hearing sample-based hip hop, and really being influenced by that and hearing jazz records [being sampled] and that connecting because I grew up in a jazz household. It’s all connected. When I tried to learn how to play those beats it didn’t sound the same. How is it being made? Oh, wow, you’re manipulating an old sound, or a different sound and repurposing it for something new. To me that was fascinating. Utilising what’s available, to create.
How has your process evolved since your 2016 International Anthem album In The Moment?
I have more and more techniques to chop things or repurpose the audio, rearrange it. It’s evolved. I chop a track freehand, like in Arrangement View. I’ll go through the whole track, chop up samples, colour code and then rearrange them. Those could be a variety of different sizes and I’ll rearrange them, re-edit them, then create a little composition collage with different moments of live playing. I’ll use that as a collage that tells a story that can be shaped one way or another. Other times I’ll use Push, chop a sample across Push, and re-perform that using a virtual instrument. So many ways you can chop the sample. Or I could do it in Clip View where I make a variety of different clips then I can arrange it or perform it and edit that depending on how it’ll fit with the narrative of the record. Every time I do a record I’m exploring [recording] as another process, another tool for creating sound.
The live sessions you use in your records come from a variety of sources. The Where We Come From mixtape sampled recordings from the live Chicago x London gigs at Total Refreshment Centre in the UK. Your recent reimagining of Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here for XL sampled jam sessions you set up specifically for that record in your studio. What do you have to consider when you’re bringing musicians together to make music that you’ll later sample?
My main goal is to create some kind of electric moment. I love being in the studio but there’s a different feeling in the room when people are there. It heightens the feeling. In the studio there’s a different mood. It’s a completely different space. One of the things I’m trying to create is a cool, down to earth feeling, where it can be intimate and not too much of a hoopla and where everyone can be comfortable to just play. Ideally we can just capture some of the magic and I can distill that through the process. Part of it is capturing the energy. It’s more than capturing the best recording. I want to capture a fleeting moment that you don’t get all the time.
What are the varying sources of the material you used on the XL record?
Samples off my dad’s first three records – which I had to sample direct off vinyl, because it doesn't exist digitally. That was a fun old-school process. The sessions were with Ben Lamar Gay, Jeff Parker and Junius Paul. I play Wurly, synth, bass. Overdub sessions with Greg Spiro on piano and harpist Brandee Younger. Then it was me doing my Ableton process on everything: editing, composing or using the audio to manipulate and layer; creative mixing. That’s how I make music, pulling from my resources and booking sessions and trying to hear what the music needs and let the music lead the way. I make a lot of versions. As pieces settled, and I started to build the narrative and that’s when a lot of pieces came in, making more interludes.
Often you’re also playing in these sessions. Obviously you’ll be in the flow of the playing but are you also thinking about the session as a sample source?
Yes, in some ways. I take some responsibility on the bandstand to manage the thing. It all started from a series of gigs we were doing in Chicago, this Spontaneous Composition series where we’d just have guys and women play two 45-minute sets and we recorded all of them. That material became In The Moment. We were playing free but I like to try and bring in different grooves, finding different spaces, and I’d always have ways I’d try to end it on a high note.
There are so many layers when it comes to improvisation. There could be non-idiomatic styles of improvisation where we’re abstracting traditional sound or rhythm and keeping away from time. Or a jam band or straight ahead jazz where you’re playing over a loop. That’s one of the things about straight ahead jazz, it’s cyclical: AAB, a recurring form of a loop and a beat that goes and goes and goes. People can take solos on it, it can go on forever. It’s a cyclical format. It’s all connected. If I’m going to improvise, especially for an audience, I’m going to keep a bit of direction. Moderate the conversation a bit, keep it concise, be aware of how long it’s supposed to be. I don’t like to get stuck on one idea for too long, I like to keep things going, I like an element of freedom in the sets. All that makes it more interesting for the sampling than if we’re super tight.
I wonder if some people have some preconceptions about improvisation. What do you have to say to anyone who might feel that improvisation is a special thing, only for the avant-garde people?
For me that’s a foreign way of thinking about it. I think of improvisation as life. We all do it. When people say ‘I can’t improvise’ I think it’s interesting. We all do it, every moment, every day.
We’re doing it now…
We’re doing it now. We bring order and time and schedule and try to confine the chaos. Improvisation in jazz is the same thing, depending on the style and the tune. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re just doing what you want. You’re playing to the form, you’re playing within the harmony, you’re playing with the rhythm, within a style or sound, you’re playing in the same tuning as other people. Even if you’re reading music verbatim, your inflection or your intent could be really in the moment and that is improvising to some level. I would argue we’re all improvising as artists. Improvisation in music is an expression of life and it can be done in every style of music. It’s not unique to jazz.
Where’s your studio?
Chicago, at home. Walk down the open staircase and there’s a large room, full of stuff everywhere. That’s the entry room. There’s couches, a child’s drum set, a couple of samplers, sheet music, a percussion rack, posters of festivals I’ve done since I was 15, and some drums against the wall. Then you come into the room 15x12 feet, it’s big enough. My piano has a Roland Juno-60 on top of it, there’s a drum set, an acoustic bass – it’s a bit cluttered. My Rhodes has an Akai sampler on top of it. Then there’s the bass corner, where the bass amp lives, a wooden xylophone set up on a piano bench, some dirty clothes, another sampler and keyboard station with the Wurlitzer – that’s probably the favourite of my instruments – and on top of that is a Minimoog. Then there’s my desk with a 20-30 inch screen TV connected to my laptop. Studio monitors, more samplers, studio PA. I have microphones. It’s set up for rehearsal and I can record. There’s stuff everywhere.
You’ve been involved with the Ableton University workshops. What was the equivalent for you when you were coming up? Where did you go to soak up the knowledge?
I was a drummer who made music with different bands [but] any sort of creative production, I was interested in. So when I came to Chicago I used to go to a couple of beat communities here including one at [now-shuttered Chicago venue] Morseland. They had a beat night and all these different cats would come through and it was a community. I just went to check things out and listen.
What were you using back then and what were the questions you wanted answered?
I had a couple of sequencers I was messing with. First it was in the studio, getting into editing, with an engineer working with ProTools and me sitting on the couch trying to ask them to do XYZ. I started making beats with a Line 6 Pedal, just looping stuff off vinyl and recording it into my computer. Even then I was messing with some Reason and some Ableton on my college room mate’s computer, starting to mess with samples. I started using Ableton Live pretty early on. I was intrigued. I loved the way you can use it like a DAW but it has this whole Clip View thing so you’re always looking at music cyclically. To me that’s a profound difference. Viewing the music cyclically as loops which can go on forever and you can change them and manipulate them, to be performative not just a recording tool.
When you’re learning a new piece of kit are you someone who goes straight to the tutorials or do you prefer to play and see?
I’ll just play with it and see what it can do. I’ll try to catch some tutorials, skim through stuff and read, but then actually talk to people who use it either on the user hang, virtually or in person. If you want to use something, leave no stone unturned, investigate from a lot of different angles and seek opinions of people who are more knowledgeable and better at it than you.
There’s a growing community of highly-skilled musicians, some of whom are also producers like Emma-Jean Thackray or harpist-beatmakers Nala Sinephro and Marysia Osu. Do you think this moment, where there’s a spotlight on jazz-related music, will create a new set of producers who also have high levels of musicianship?
It’s not entirely out of nowhere. We’ve had this kind of energy happening for years. It has prominence or attention now. The culture around recorded music, how to make it and what’s possible, who has access – these things are ever-changing and evolving. There’s more space for it, more demand for it, more inclusion for this kind of music from a broader audience. More and more people are bridging these gaps.
Keep up with Makaya McCraven on his website.
Text and interview: Emma Warren
Emma Warren is the author of Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre. Her new pamphlet Document Your Culture is available on Bandcamp.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yw9y3v/makaya-mccraven-universal-beings-noisey-next-interview
Makaya McCraven's Utopian Vision of Jazz Could Change the World
Makaya McCraven is skeptical of borders. The drummer and composer was born in Paris, grew up in Western Massachusetts, and has lived in Chicago for the past 12 years. Recently, aside from touring, he’s spent a fair amount of time in London, Los Angeles, and New York for work reasons. Sitting in a photographer’s apartment studio in Manhattan, recovering from the unseasonable fall heat he’s endured during a brief press jaunt in the city, he tells me that he feels connections to all these places—and none of them.
“I’m not beholden to this border or this city,” he says, absentmindedly toying with a medallion on a chain around his neck. “What is a place? Other than the people. It’s just dirt, you know?”
We find ourselves on this abstract train of thought after I bring up the current state of jazz in Chicago, a much trend-pieced phenomenon that largely involves people from outside the city fetishizing the music that McCraven and his close-knit scene of friends are making for punkish labels like International Anthem. Their vision of the genre is malleable, with players drawing on, say, hip-hop or cumbia or kosmische or techno and bringing that into their world of rhythmic improvisation. It’s a scene where gatekeeping is frowned upon: If you’re wondering if these vibrant cross-pollinations are even jazz, you’re asking the wrong questions.
McCraven allows that there is something special happening in Chicago. But the same thing’s happening more or less everywhere, he argues. London’s scene is bursting with omnivorous and hungry young jazz musicians. Los Angeles, too, has seen the rise of a new generation of experimenters and cosmic seekers. New York’s no slouch either, as jazz players here continue to shirk the established institutions in favor of newer, weirder, more democratic spaces.
“It’s a crazy time to be alive,” he says. “There’s a craving for something visceral, something honest, something vulnerable from art.”
So why limit yourself to one place—to one sound? That’s one of the questions driving the music that McCraven’s released this year, two connected but distinct projects called Where We Come From (a mixtape released back in July) and Universal Beings (a mammoth double-LP that’s came out in October). He recorded the former at a residency in London, with a band of local players that—as he announces on the set’s opening track—he’d just met. Each side of the latter features a different cast of musicians in a different city, including London, New York, Chicago, and LA. Both records begin from free improvisation, which he then edits down in software into fragmented loops and off-kilter beats. His work draws on the many legacies of jazz, but also on funk rhythms, rap production, musique concrète techniques, and a whole lot more.
“We are all interconnected, We’re all building off the past. [My music] is a vision of a world that’s less fragmented and segregated.” — Makaya McCraven
In a sense, this is borderless music, forged out of alchemical interactions between people but also a higher-level interaction between the communities those people make up. “We are all interconnected,” he says. “We’re all building off the past. It’s a vision of a world that’s less fragmented and segregated.”
McCraven, now 35, sees his childhood as the beginning of his current journey. He was born in France, to what he calls an “artistic, progressive, politically minded musician family.”
His father was an American expat, himself a jazz drummer who played with many of the era’s avant-gardists, and his mother was a folk musician from Hungary, who ended up in France when members of her band were targeted by the Hungarian government because their pan-Eastern European music didn’t fit with the government’s more nationalist inclinations. Soon they moved to Amherst, a college town in Western Massachusetts that was then home to some of Makaya’s father’s mentors, like the legendary saxophonist Archie Shepp and multi-instrumentalist Yusuf Lateef.
His dad had him on the drum set from a really young age, and he had the opportunity to sit in on rehearsals from some of the world’s all-time greatest jazz musicians. Still, he says he didn’t own his relationship to the instrument until high school, when he fell in with the school’s jazz band, then formed a band of his own with a bunch of older kids. It was an early lesson in genre-obliteration. They drew on McCraven’s upbringing in jazz, but also everything from the Roots to jam bands to Rage Against the Machine, and they had a frontman who rapped. They called themselves Cold Duck Complex.
“It was a silly name,” McCraven says, sighing. “But we did a lot.”
The band was also a lesson in DIY for McCraven. Cold Duck Complex booked their own shows, street-teamed, and did radio promo, slowly becoming something of a local phenomenon (McCraven says they were one of the biggest bands in Western Mass for a time.) They played gigs with Digable Planets, Pharcyde, and Mix Master Mike. In 2002, they even opened a college show headlined by 50 Cent, who came onstage wearing a bulletproof vest (“That was my first taste of how hype works,” he says, with a laugh.)
McCraven eventually did a brief stint at UMass himself, but dropped out soon after because he was getting enough work to sustain himself as a full-time musician, often playing weddings or with jazz bands or DJs or indie rock acts. They weren’t always the best shows in the world, but it was a living, and he figured he could learn a little bit from everyone, a philosophy that’s driven his work since. He recalls seeing Lateef, a master saxophonist and flautist, taking oboe lessons at UMass, well into his 80s, a lesson in continual forward motion.
So when he moved to Chicago in 2006—drawn westward by his wife’s acceptance of a tenure-track position at Northwestern—he took it as a opportunity for growth. He was “starting from scratch” in terms of the professional relationships, but he quickly got into the swing of things, taking on whatever gigs he could. He still felt like a bit of an outsider in whatever scene he happened to be moving in—too “inside” for avant-gardists, too out-there for straight-ahead jazz groups, too jazzy for hip-hop. But in each situation, he said, he learned a little more about himself as a musician. “Having a diverse career has been the crux to my survival as an artist,” McCraven says.
Eventually, the founders of International Anthem approached him with an opportunity to put together a series of improvised music nights in Chicago. An engineer would record each performance, with the idea that McCraven would use them as demos for his debut on the label. McCraven started loading the files into Ableton, adding effects and tweaking the EQ, just to make it sound a little better as he listened back. But then he started doing something strange.
Since his days in Cold Duck Complex, McCraven had nursed a fascination with rap beats. He’d tried making them before, coming home from backbreaking days of gigs to spend all night in front of a laptop, flipping samples and programming drum parts. Surveying the raw audio of these improvised sessions, he finally saw an opportunity to marry the two sides of his work.
“There’s some beautiful things that happen in these improvised concerts,” he says. “There can be awkward moments when I get musicians who have never met [before in front of an audience]. There’s some danger there. Is it going to suck? It kinda sucks right now! There’s something magical and vulnerable about that.”
Scrolling through hours of jams—filled with the hesitation and musical “Oh, excuse me you first”s that characterize improvisational efforts—he would find the best moments and loop them. Sometimes, those passages last only seconds, but through editing the pieces, McCraven can linger in them for as long as he likes.
In 2015, he made a record that demonstrated the power of this technique, and it vaulted him to the forefront of a generation of jazz musicians playing with the strictures of the form. Though he describes that album, In the Moment, as a “process of discovery,” it still holds much of the magic that fuels his music now, taking traditionally freaky tropes of avant-garde jazz—woody bleats of saxophone splatter-painted across his hopscotching snare—and using software to present them in a new context. Inspired by Madlib’s flips of Sun Ra or Don Cherry records (which warped out-jazz experiments into wooly beatwork, and brought those sounds to new audiences in the process) he sees these edits, in part, as a way of reaching open-minded listeners who might not otherwise listen to jazz. Twisting those sounds into more familiar forms, like rap beats, offers a way in.
“Realizing that DJs and crate-diggers might know more about jazz records than people spending 50 dollars and a two-drink minimum to go see me play at a club in New York—that was inspiring,” he says.
His greatest challenge since then has been figuring out how far he can push this new style. He can make something cool out of flipping these improvisations, sure—2017’s Highly Rare has some pieces that feel pretty unlike anything I’ve ever heard from experimental electronic music or jazz—but what could he say with them? Where We Come From is small in scope, based on a single set of performances in the UK, but it was the first time McCraven pushed his sound to some of its natural conclusions.
If you listen to the record without reading along with the tracklist, you’ll notice that certain snippets of melody and vocals appear across multiple tracks. That’s partly because McCraven uses some of them as motifs, trying to wring different emotions out of a restrained palette. But it’s also because after he edited them, he passed them to some producer friends who then edited them again, turning them into bruising beats or dancefloor-ready jams. The result demonstrates the astonishing versatility of the technique he created. Some of the pieces on Where We Come From feel like an even more radical version of the mutant L.A. jazz on To Pimp a Butterfly, by which I mean, Kendrick, please get at Mayaka if you want to explore new worlds.
Universal Beings though, is a different beast entirely. At 91 minutes and 22 tracks, it’s a behemoth of a record, and the music is occasionally as intimidating as its runtime suggests. There’s gnarled 10-minute jams full of contortionist rhythmic interplay (“Atlantic Black”), nauseous two-stepping grooves (“Flipped OUT”), and a track described on by one the players on a trippy interlude as a “gust of energy coming down this mountain that I feel on my back kinda vibe” (“Butterss’s”).
"[Editing improvisations is] a way of transporting us to a magical space,” McCraven says. “Anything can happen.”
The playing drips with sort of electric energy that can only come from a group of people in a room free-associating together. But it’s made all the more strange and alluring by McCraven’s editing. Sometimes you feel the jump cuts in your chest; sometimes they happen without you noticing, but either way, you understand intuitively why he loops the sections he does; they’re grooves you never really want to leave. He’s taking something happened in a room somewhere, between some people, and sending it to another place.
“I’m going to flip it and recontextualize it and change it; it’s a way of transporting us to a magical space,” he says. “Anything can happen.”
Universal Beings fulfills this promise more than any of his other records so far, with McCraven enlisting dozens of players from around the world into his search for the perfect moment. There are indicators that some bits were recorded in certain places with specific groups of people—when the delicate breeze of a harp shows up on “Holy Lands,” for example, you can check the liner notes and see that it was recorded at H0l0 in Ridgewood, Queens, the only room where McCraven had a harpist in tow.
And yet, there’s something about his approach that draws all these disparate players into the same universe—something that makes the mystical malleted percussion of “Black Lion” (recorded in Queens) feel like it shares mutated DNA with the hopscotching sax of “Suite Haus” (recorded in London). You could blame it on McCraven’s coherent taste as a bandleader, or you could take could come to a more metaphysical understanding. One player does, on the dialogue sampled on “Brighter Days Beginning.” Amid a discussion about privilege, collectivity, and the strange power of this music, someone comes to a realization: “We’re universal beings.”
On the record, and in McCraven’s world writ large, borders dissolve, barriers crumble. Everything is available to you. All of humanity is in conversation. All you have to do is just start playing, on his count.
Makaya McCraven will perform the music of Universal Beings at two shows this fall, one in Chicago and one in New York.
Olivia Locher is a photographer based in New York. Find more of her work on Instagram.
Colin Joyce is an editor at Noisey and is on Twitter.
https://downbeat.com/news/detail/makaya-mccraven-distillation-ideas/P1
Makaya McCraven’s ‘Distillation of Ideas’
By Aaron Cohen I Jan. 22, 2019
Seeing guitarist Jeff Parker perform sparked new ideas for drummer Makaya McCraven. (Photo: David Marques)
Makaya McCraven uses various means to create and redirect energy, as evidenced on his latest album, Universal Beings (International Anthem). Just as he’s done on previous releases, the drummer took kinetic segments from live performances, edited them and turned them into striking original compositions.
Geography became both more and less of a factor on this record’s sessions, held in 2017 and 2018. On these tracks, McCraven led distinct groups in four cities, and here, too, transformation yielded new works that stood apart from the original sources.
Maintaining the conversation’s momentum with few detours, McCraven blended seemingly disparate ideas during a discussion with DownBeat at a coffee shop in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood, a few blocks from his home. He spoke with the same intense focus that he brings to the bandstand. (It’s not surprising that he was captain of his high school football team.) Although McCraven describes himself as competitive, his forcefulness is intertwined with generosity.
Universal Beings includes contributions from a singular string section—harpist Brandee Younger and cellist Tomeka Reid joining McCraven’s longtime bassist Junius Paul on some tracks—and exchanges with British players, including saxophonists Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia. McCraven’s inclusive perspective also means his collaborations focus on people, rather than their instruments, just as the percussionist’s Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape) does.
“I just try to follow the best, most sensitive, dynamic and creative people I know,” McCraven said. “Good musicians have instincts: They’re not going to cover each other up; [they] give space, play together. If you have musicians who are sensitive, listen, I hope I get to learn something from them and hope they rub off on me in a positive way. It’s an opportunity to bring a lot of great people into a place and let great people do great things.”
McCraven constructed the tracks on Universal Beings from his groups’ improvisational sets recorded in 2017–’18 in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and London. His take on funk seems universal. On “Mantra” and “Holy Lands,” his accents propel Younger and Reid’s interwoven lines. Live and in the studio, the drummer’s sense of tension frames Hutchings’ solo on “Atlantic Black” before quickly changing the tempo. Sometimes he also unifies contrasting rhythms, such as the 5/8 superimposed over a 4/4 feel on “Young Genius.” Still, there is some mystery involved, as McCraven explained when describing how he crafted “Black Lion.”
“In the session, there was a straightforward backbeat groove that we lined up into,” McCraven said. “My first perspective was to find an intro, fade the whole thing in with a filter. Afterwards, I isolated melodic moments in the harp to give the song melodic content and chop bars into smaller bits to alter the chord changes. By the time it develops, it then opens back up into the improvisatory part, from the same improvisation we had. Then, after a hard switch to the next part, it opens up a little bit and takes itself out. It’s a puzzle. There are only 30 seconds we played this one thing, but those 30 seconds are magical. Part of the process is isolating these moments.”
Hutchings—who alters recorded performances via audio edits for one of his groups, The Comet Is Coming—is a kindred spirit. But he feels that his affinity with McCraven (with whom he first played in 2017) is fueled by the drummer’s emphasis on spontaneity.
“Makaya set up his drums, didn’t play anything, didn’t sound check, just set his stuff up, didn’t make any noise,” Hutchings said. “The first noise we made together was the first note of the concert. There was no second-guessing what anyone was going to do, no figuring out how we navigate the personalities beforehand. He wants that experience and he’s happy to put himself into the unknown.”
Younger, who described her aesthetic as “very groovy and very vampy,” felt completely comfortable in the group. She said that on the bandstand, McCraven displayed not only a great respect for her instrument, but for her skills as a musician.
“I asked Makaya, ‘Do you have music?’” Younger recalled. “He said, ‘You are music.’ That will keep you on your toes.”
In conversation, McCraven, 35, drew connections between his upbringing and his design for Universal Beings. His father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, brought his warm touch to such albums as Archie Shepp’s Black Ballads (1992). But McCraven drew as much inspiration from his mother, Hungarian singer Ágnes Zsigmondi. She ignored supposed boundaries to demonstrate how her country’s songs derive from a multitude of ethnicities. Similarly, McCraven seeks to dismiss any internal or external barriers. This point becomes pertinent given the rise of exclusionary nationalism throughout the planet.
“My mother’s group, Kolinda, did Hungarian music, Jewish music, Gypsy music, and the political statement was, ‘This is our music,’” McCraven said. “That wasn’t taken well by the Hungarian government at the time. Its lines were drawn not by culture, but by power. I’m saying, ‘Fuck those lines, this is my world to walk.’”
Born in France, McCraven grew up in western Massachusetts, his family members representing a range of nationalities and social classes. As a youngster, he sought out connections among diverse communities within the college town of Amherst. His years as a teenage musician and athlete involved episodes of crossing through various social strata. His amiability became crucial to his success, as he started working professionally at age 15, playing in the band Cold Duck Complex, and booking gigs around the East Coast. Through that group, McCraven blended his father’s jazz influence with rock and hip-hop. The latter’s rhythms add to why he still identifies himself as a “beat scientist.” Here, too, McCraven presented this concept in personal and international terms.
“A beat is no more than the ticking of a clock—beats per minute,” he said. “Our only way of measuring time is by adding rhythm. It’s deep in science—from the rotation of Earth going around the sun—[and] all about pulse and rhythm. I study beats, whether it’s hip-hop beats or hip-hop production, whether that’s the cymbal beat of a jazz band or polyrhythm, advanced meter, odd time signatures or the polyrhythms of West African music. Rhythm and time are all-important to me.”
McCraven had no local musical contacts when he moved to Chicago in 2006 (joining his wife, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois). So, he forged ahead making his own connections, taking every gig and, as he said, “got pulled into the straightahead world” through working with guitarist Bobby Broom and pianist Willie Pickens (1931–2017). He released his own jazz piano trio disc, Split Decision (Chicago Sessions), in 2012, some of which drew on Hungarian melodic motifs.
When McCraven saw guitarist Jeff Parker play sets of free jazz interspersed with a DJ at a Chicago bar called Rodan, he sought a similar kind of residency at another small venue, The Bedford. He realized that experimental jazz artists could draw listeners to Chicago clubs without simplifying their music. McCraven also was paying attention to adventurous hip-hop producers like Madlib, who has sampled Sun Ra. McCraven wanted to challenge longstanding orthodoxies of free improvisation within his own groups: Grooves and solid vamps had as much of a place as abstraction. Several musicians showed up to contribute, including bassist Joshua Abrams, who mentioned how the drummer combines jazz and hip-hop legacies on his own terms.
“With Makaya, there’s a dialog about how he’s concerned with his music’s relationship with sample-based music and certain realms of hip-hop,” Abrams said. “But then he adjusts sounds, loops things, and it’s cool to see how that’s affected different sounds of the kit.”
After recording about 48 hours worth of material throughout 10 months, International Anthem Recording Co. producer Scott McNiece encouraged McCraven’s experiments with splicing the tapes in his home studio. Sometimes McCraven overdubbed percussion or keyboard parts to bring out more compositional sensibilities. The resulting album, In The Moment, came out in 2015. The follow-up, Highly Rare (2017), derived from a similar method of remixing open-ended live sessions. McCraven said that the difference between the two was that since he felt the latter’s source material sounded more aggressive, he layered in more drums and loops, “so it wouldn’t just be ‘out’ the whole time.”
Media attention from beyond the jazz world followed, and the bandleader has not been the only beneficiary. Alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, who performed on those dates, credited a growing audience for his own music to what he observed as a “widespread interest in that record’s production style.”
Such interest has brought McCraven more opportunities for large-ensemble performances. At the time of his DownBeat interview in October, McCraven was preparing to take a group (including Parker and Younger) to the Mondriaan Jazz Festival in The Hague, and he was planning to perform with a 10-piece band at a Red Bull Music Academy event in Chicago. To provide his bandstand collaborators with a roadmap, McCraven has transcribed songs from his International Anthem albums into written arrangements. As McCraven described it, notating and arranging is not far removed from distilling improvisational moments in the studio.
“The process is, I find the parts I liked, locate them and assign them to a player in the group, which might be a different instrument, depending on who’s playing with me,” McCraven said. “I use the melodies and motifs, arrange them and give it a more structured form. When I take the improvisations, I reduce them to this thing that has a structure, but structure can still be loose, reduce it again to core concepts and make a sequence and use that basic composition as a basis for musicians to improvise and make something new. It’s the use of form, recurring form.”
McCraven added that jazz itself is based on ideas of how to use repetition: “Jazz is no more than loops, anyway. Recurring form—AABA—we use that as a vehicle for improvisation to create something new. What I love about that process is that all composition starts with improvisation.
“We improvise, then I edit and rearrange and recontextualize that source material into a new distillation of ideas. Then I can take it and pass it to a DJ, who can remix those ideas. Then [we] take that remix and get a live band to learn the remix, then we can perform it as a live band and use it as a catalyst to improvise over that form or create something [else]. Then we have an additional piece of music that doesn’t resemble the improvisation but is a representation of an electronic-sounding remix of that first reimagination. And if we record that live band, we can chop it up all over again and continue the process. It’s a regenerative process of composition—using what was there to reimagine something new. It’s kind of neat; it’s meta.
“But the end result isn’t what I’m getting at,” he continued. “It’s a process—which part of the process were you there for? It exists in a sonic space that doesn’t exist in our physical realm. But it speaks to the depth of this music, jazz, culture, rhythm, oral tradition. You can’t really pinpoint all of it in words. It’s culture as an organic living thing that evolves, like people.”
At some point in the future, McCraven would like to delve deeper into the source of many of the beats that shape Universal Beings, especially the shifting polyrhythms associated with the traditional music of Africa.
“There are so many other people I want to work with, who I would love to bring into this process,” McCraven said. “I want to travel around Africa—Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, places I already have connections with musicians, [including] Gnawa musicians. These are people I met through my father. I would do a week in each city, meet musicians, drummers, have a kind of cultural exchange, something where we have an experience and can document that and use that for source material. That’s the next phase of the concept. Universal Beings is just a culmination of me investigating this process, trying to connect with people and seeing how much I can do with it. I’m inspired that people like this, that I’m allowed to do this.” DB
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2020/02/11/makaya-mccraven-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/
Makaya McCraven: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Makaya McCraven has been making music his whole life, growing up in a musical family where dad was jazz drummer Stephen McCraven and mom was Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi. Born in Paris but raised in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, McCraven came of age with instruments all over the house and frequent visits from musicians. It was in the air.
As a high school student, he was in a live hip hop band called Cold Duck Complex—and playing with them, plus gigging regularly with jazz musicians, folk artists and others put an early end to his formal training at University of Massachusetts. However, he’s made his own path since, combining a beat-maker’s willingness to experiment with recorded sound, a jazz player’s comfort with improvisation and collaboration, and a classically trained musician’s understanding of orchestration and arrangement.
McCraven moved to Chicago in 2007, where he has become integral to that city’s fertile jazz scene. Since 2015, he has recorded primarily with standard-setting label, International Anthem, often along with other Chicago mainstays including Junius Paul, Ben LaMar Gay and others. McCraven is a musician, composer and bandleader, but he is also highly regarded for his “chopping” or remixing and re-imagining production skills. We’re New Again, his reconfiguration of the late-career classic Gil Scott Heron album I’m New Here, will be one of 2020’s top recordings, putting a fresh spin on moving meditations on family, personal history and black identity. We talked to him about that project, the process of remixing and the way he and Heron find links between many different kinds of music. words / j kelly
Aquarium Drunkard: How did you get involved with the Gil-Scott Heron project?
Makaya McCraven: Originally Richard Russell and Ben Peterson from XL Archives came to me with the idea and told me a little bit about the concept of the project. It was an honor, and I gave it some thought. It was a lot to take on, but that’s really how it started.
AD: It’s a really interesting album, very late in his career, a quieter, more acoustic, somewhat less political album than the stuff from earlier on. What about it resonates with you?
Makaya McCraven: I definitely felt that it was a personal album. And introspective. I guess that it was made in a different time in his life. It just kind of connected with me in terms of the legacy of great black musicians and artists in general and wanting to pay homage to that and support that. It hit home in different ways.
AD: Were you a long-time fan of his?
Makaya McCraven: Definitely. I’ve been influenced by his work from the earliest days. I remember hearing his music around the house when I was growing up. In later years, I found myself connecting what I heard— like “The revolution will not be televised,” by Gil-Scott Heron, wow—to what I was doing. It was a process of things coming together like that for me…things in the air, things I was doing. You know what I mean?
AD: But that must make it somewhat more difficult and maybe a little intimidating to re-imagine something that he made.
Makaya McCraven: Absolutely, and that unfolded more and more as I worked on the project. Definitely it was daunting. I wanted to really support his voice in the project as well as bring something that was totally me and my musical vision around it. There was a lot of space to do whatever, to do your thing. And I proposed a few ideas, and the people involved were like, yeah, it all sounds great.
AD: Did you have contact with his family or his estate? Were they giving you input?
Makaya McCraven: Well, of course, we had to be in touch with them and clear different things with them and you know that’s all gone well and been really supportive. We’ve talked to people who worked with him, like Brian Jackson. I’ve been really happy that the people we’ve been in touch with have said thank you for supporting his legacy. Thank you for doing this. That’s been great.
AD: Can you tell me a little about the process of re-imagining this music? How did you start and what principles guided you as you moved forward with this?
Makaya McCraven: Well, I tried to dig into him, as a person, so I was reading interviews and listening to some of the stuff that I was given that was not released. I also talked to Richard [who produced the original album] about what it was like working on this record with him. I wanted to get some feeling about what it was like being in the studio, where Gil’s head was at. And so that conversation with Richard was really great.
AD: What did you learn? Where was he at?
Makaya McCraven: I’m not entirely sure, but I knew that they were talking about the sparseness of the record. I was really dealing with the fact that it was sonically so different from the rest of Gil’s work and also what I generally work with. I work with a lot of acoustic sounds, and I like to sample them and reimagine them. So, my first thought was that I’d do a remix where I’d get to work with the audio, and then reimagine that under the vocals. That’s my first thought.
But dealing with this record, it was so different that I wanted to
bring a more organic approach to it. I feel like the family themes—Gil
looking at his grandmother and his mother and talking about going back
to Tennessee, “New York Is Killing Me,” “Born in Chicago”— really
connected with me. It led me into a conversation with Richard about my
parents’ music and their influence on me. I wanted to incorporate some
of that into the project somehow. Which led me to sample some of the old
records I had.
AD: Really, of your parents?
Makaya McCraven: Yeah.
AD: Neat, what did you use and where is it?
Makaya McCraven: I mostly used the first three records my father [jazz drummer Stephen McCraven) made. Largely from this one record, Wooly the Newt, which is really not available digitally now. I sampled directly off the record, which is the best way to get that done. Different tracks feature different samples. It’s not everywhere on the record. One of my favorites is on “Lily Scott (Broken Home Part 3).” That’s a track where my father was playing percussion, kalimba, and my mother is playing a flute, and Gil is talking about the women who raised him. That was kind of poetic for me.
AD: I was going to ask you about the theme of family on this original album and how it resonates with you, and that’s a really interesting way that it does.
Makaya McCraven: My father never worked with Gil, but he worked with some of Gil’s collaborators and he had a similar spirit in his music. So, that kind of brought it home to me. It was a nice place to begin. Working with a legacy like this, I wanted to take the same kind of approach to it from my perspective. That was me giving it my all.
AD: You had a lot of musicians in your circle growing up. Did you ever meet Gil Scott Heron?
Makaya McCraven: No, no, never met him.
AD: You are known as a drummer and a band leader and a composer…
Makaya McCraven: And a father and a son and a …
AD: Right, but I wanted to ask you about the re-imagining. How did you get into that and what do you enjoy about reconfiguring other people’s work?
Makaya McCraven: Well, you know, really this is something I’ve been working with and experimenting with for a long time, in terms of creative pursuits. I’ve always been influenced by hip hop and contemporary music as well as the music we call jazz in all its different forms, from avant garde to swing and bebop and so forth, as well as funk, rock, reggae. I’ve always worked with a lot of different kinds of music including hip hop. I’ve worked with hip hop bands and when we do that, sometimes we try to cover a hip hop beat or something, and it doesn’t come across the same way as the record. That’s what’s special about using samples or DJing. And that led me to be influenced by recorded sounds of all sorts— like the Beatles did or Les Paul when he was using tape machines or mellotron.
We’ve only been dealing with recorded sound for a century or so. I think it’s fascinating that we can use the studio to create sonic environments that don’t even exist in the natural world. And through that pursuit of understanding what I was listening to and experimenting with how to create music like that, it led me to do more producing, both in the hip hop sense and also when I’m with a band. I like to work, not just as a drummer or instrumentalist, but as an artist or creator or producer in coordination with other artists. When I began applying that to my playing, my instrumentalist side, I started to develop this hybrid of styles, which is what the last few records have been, taking instrumental music and adding some production elements or reconceptualizing the sound using contemporary electronics. That has been something I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve wanted to work with vocalists, to expand into different places where I’m making music like this. This came as a really cool way to evolve and keep challenging myself in ways, in this space, that is a big part of the way I create. For me, it really worked well.
AD: Did you use all recorded sound, or did you have musicians in to work on it as well?
Makaya McCraven: Oh no, the majority of the music was played in my studio as well as studios in Chicago. I have a variety of different musicians that worked on the record. A lot of them are regular collaborators who I’ve worked with for the last few years.
AD: Can you talk about some of them in particular, who they are and what they were able to do for you?
Makaya McCraven: Absolutely. The first person I called was Jeff Parker, who is a great collaborator of mine. He’s been a mentor and a great friend, and he’s just a knowledgeable and committed artist and collector with deep knowledge of music. He seemed like the perfect person to talk to about this.
Ben LaMar Gay was somebody that I also felt would know and understand and be able to contribute to getting a feel for Gil. I thought he’d be able to help particularly, with this blues undertone I was thinking about in the project. You know, Gil called himself a blues-ologist. Now, people call him the godfather of hip hop, but I was thinking well, “What does he call himself?” Material like “Me and the Devil” and a lot of his earlier work was very much rooted in the blues, the deep roots of black music. I’ve worked with Ben, and I knew he’d be attuned to this. He’d been playing this one-stringed instrument he called a “diddley bow,” the kind of instrument you would associate with field songs and spirituals. I thought that was a nice touch or starting place.
Junius Paul is on bass. He’s the right hand man to a lot of the music I make. And then we did a session with Brandee Younger and Joel Ross which was really fruitful for the record. A saxophonist from Chicago, Fred Jackson, and um, yeah, that’s the majority of it.
And then post-production, I played a variety of instruments across the record, some bass, some keyboards, some percussion, there are some samples of Gil playing the piano that I chopped up and used to have his touch on the instrument with us.
AD: But primarily the thing that’s consistent from the original album and this one is the vocals?
Makaya McCraven: His voice, yeah. That’s the main thing. It’s his voice. I used one little piece of sound, maybe two, one just for a split second and the other only audible for a few seconds, but I used them as a marker and just an homage to the original.
There was also a narrative to the original that I liked. A lot of pieces came together in a sequence. This kind of record, it’s a start-to-finish kind of record. More than it is like, “Oh, my favorite song is this one.” Though there are a couple in there that I will point to and say check out this song. But for me, it came together as the sequence came together. That really helped the whole thing…the narrative of it.
AD: It really moves in a beautiful way. As a drummer, do you start with rhythm?
Makaya McCraven: Not necessarily. In some cases, starting with rhythm is a necessity in terms of format, especially with samples and electronics. So, the rhythm is really important to the pace with the voice and all that. But often, I start harmonically just because, I don’t know, there’s something that interests me …like being a composer and writing music and being a thoroughly studied musician.
I like to incorporate all kinds of instruments, bass and keyboards and trombones and a Rhodes, a piano, acoustic basses, drum sets, midi controllers, xylophones. I try to use them both because I like to work with other people, but I try to gain some amount of proficiency on different instruments and use them as tools to write. That’s a big part of my creative process. I’ve always liked to play multiple instruments. I grew up around multiple instruments. Drums was just something I played from an early age. My father was a drummer. The drums were there, set up in the house. So, as I got older that was just the one I was best at. But I also was a bass player.
AD: I don’t mean to pigeonhole you, I just really love the way the album moves.
Makaya McCraven: Oh, thank you very much.
AD: I know you said that for you, the album works best as a whole and sequencing is important. But I did wonder if you had a favorite song, or even a favorite sound or a moment? Anything that turned out really well and even maybe surprised you by how great it sounded?
Makaya McCraven: “I’ll Take Care of You,” which was kind of a big hit on the original album. I didn’t realize some of the different place that song had gone. But for some reason, it wasn’t coming together, and there were four different versions of the song. It only really came together at the very last minute. I really like the way it came out. It became one of the catchier songs, I think. I was happy with that. Because I didn’t know what I was going to do. It had to be good, you know. There were some sleepless nights. You know, “Where did the night go?”
AD: I know you’re working on a bunch of other things, including something with the Chicago Symphony?
Makaya McCraven: Well, I just did a feature performance at the Chicago Symphony Center, at Orchestra Hall, last Friday.
AD: Tell me about that.
Makaya McCraven: It was a great night. The concert came out wonderfully. It’s a project I’ve been working on for many years called “In These Times,” which is an exploration of a variety of time signatures. I bring them together in polymetric ways that come across more like four-four or three-four or in different ways that are palatable or just kind of blend the line. It’s something I picked up from West African drumming, and also my mother is interested in Bulgarian folk music where they have 7/8s and 11/8s that have dances associated with them. They’re more than just intellectual exercises.
AD: I think I would fall.
Makaya McCraven: Yeah. So, I’ve been implementing these kind of rhythmic concepts in some hip hop ways and incorporating them into different influences in my writing. Half of the music we’ve been touring for a while has been this type of music, and then we play music from the records that I’ve been creating as part of the repertoire and some Gil Scott Heron tunes as well. But I’ve been taking all these compositions and recording them over the years and arranging them. We did a commissioned piece at the Walker Arts Center that led to incorporating visuals as well as some strings.
AD: I heard about the visuals.
Makaya McCraven: This was a full performance with the visuals and the string quartet, and my large ensemble, which is Brandee Younger on harp, Greg Spero on piano, Marquis Hill on trumpet, Greg Ward on alto saxophone, Irwin Pierce on tenor, Matt Gold on guitar. It was about 12 musicians in all. The show went over beautifully. I couldn’t have been happier with the way that it went. It was very comfortable and relaxed. Great response. Really beautiful space. It was really nice. The whole night was recorded. We got a really nice capture of it. I was really happy with that.
I’ve also been recording some other bigger performances. There’s a newspaper here in Chicago called In These Times. It’s a political paper. They covered me as a working musician in 2014. The piece went kind of viral and it really detailed the amount of work I was doing and the amount of people I was working with. So, now we’re doing some recordings in their offices, utilizing historical audio from Studs Terkel’s long-standing radio show, “In These Times.” There’s a really great database of interviews from James Baldwin to Harry Belafonte to Stokely Carmichael and all sorts of working people across the arts to all industries, really. He was just covering people. It’s quite a database. So, I was using that database as well for audio to kind of build the narrative of the piece and it functions with that material.
AD: Cool, that’s quite a lot, but I don’t want to cut you off if you’ve got other projects that you’re working on after this. Do you want to talk about anything else?
Makaya McCraven: There there’s some stuff that I can’t really announce. But I’m always working on music and looking to grow and collaborate and create.
AD: When I found out about this Gil Scott Heron record, I was reminded of a show you did in Chicago a couple of years ago – I was trying to get my son, who lives in Chicago, to go—but it was you doing Dilla’s Donuts with a huge ensemble.
Makaya McCraven: There’s a pianist here in Chicago named Charlie Coffeen from the band Sidewalk Chalk, which is a live hip hop band, which always reminded me of the band I came up in playing. Charlie has been doing this Dilla’s Donuts thing annually, putting together a small orchestra of about 22 musicians, plus a bunch of special guests, myself. I did the concert. Chris Turner came in, a great vocalist. Braxton Cook. It was a great thing. They’re doing it again this year. I couldn’t take part in it this time.
That and doing this large ensemble stuff kind of came from Universal Beings, because during Universal Beings, I had played with all these different ensembles. We did a series of concerts that brought the bulk of those musicians together on one stage. So, it went from several different small groups from around everywhere, to one large ensemble playing the music. And that’s kind of led to more and more of these large ensemble performances throughout the year. There’s been a progression towards conceptualizing the music for a larger group. For me it’s amazing that you can take the nugget of a small ensemble or one person or two people just creating together, and you can flip that and imagine something else, extrapolate that into a whole orchestra piece. I think that’s cool, exploring all the different ways to do that. One time. I had a composition teacher who really talked about how a whole symphony piece can come from just three notes. It’s extrapolated and enlarged, but at the core, it’s really something very simple. Hopefully, I can create and try to achieve these things.
AD: Did you go to conservatory? You must have.
Makaya McCraven: Kind of. I mean, yes, I did go to conservatory. But I really grew up playing music in an oral tradition. I really think of most of the music that I play is in that space. I enjoy playing by ear, and teaching other people by ear. People complain that I don’t have charts all the time. You know, I was that guy that my friends convinced me to come to the conservatory, but I had a tumultuous time in school. I was in a working band. I was playing professionally in high school and by the time I was in college, I was pretty busy. My professional schedule was getting in the way of school.
AD: That’s the best reason to leave conservatory, I think.
Makaya McCraven: Yeah, it was kind of challenging. I was playing with professionals, getting called to do gigs and starting to travel. I’ve been a full-time musician since I was a teenager.
AD: But the piece you played at the Chicago Symphony, you must have had to write all that down, didn’t you?
Makaya McCraven: Yeah, so I went to conservatory, but it was only really later in my professional career when I was getting asked to take on more challenging projects and handle different roles, the writing skills kind of developed and I used that more. I wish, at the time that I was in school, I was more in tune with that or could have compartmentalized my feelings about my professional side and school. I never finished. I was in and out. Taking semesters off the whole time.
AD: Which school was it?
Makaya McCraven: University of Massachusetts.
AD: Oh, right, I live in New Hampshire, really close to there.
Makaya McCraven: I grew up in Amherst. I was in a local legend band that we started in high school and played through college, running up and down the east coast playing shows.
AD: What was the name of the band?
Makaya McCraven: Cold Duck Complex. It was a live hip hop band. It did jazz and rock and jam-band-y stuff. We had a nice connection. We opened for some big hip acts like 50 Cent, Pharcyde, Digable Planets, Mixmaster Mike. I was a young guy. I was also working a lot with jazz musicians. Also, folk musicians. There’s a strong folk scene there. All sorts of stuff. That’s been the crux of my career, being a versatile musician and trying to be a facilitator around the projects and the people that I work with and working with them and having a strong work ethic and trying to be a thoroughly committed musician. If you’re committed it will take care of you – I think, I hope.
AD: It’s interesting because you have that in common with Gil Scott Heron that you’re at this conjunction of all kinds of music and that’s what makes it interesting.
Makaya McCraven: Maybe. I feel that. I appreciate musicians who are daring and just do their own thing. Uncompromising with themselves. It doesn’t mean you’re uncompromising to work with. You know what you want to do. You do what you do because you love it. I’ve always played music because I love it.
Having musician parents who had some success, too, I had no disillusionment of what I was getting involved with as an artist or freelancer. So, I was trying to keep that in mind, to do it because you love it, and keep all the reasons you love it in mind, but also work professionally and treat it like a job. So, you want to be an artist, kid, go out and create art. And find ways to facilitate your art and find ways to do it. That’s one thing about Chicago. It’s not all the hype and fluff about some of these larger markets. Here it’s like be real and do the work. You can meet some very committed artists that way.
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Drummer Makaya McCraven, The 'Beat Scientist,' Talks About His New Album
Makaya McCraven has a unique style where he makes improvised live recordings, then builds on them in the studio. His new album, which uses this method, is called Universal Beings E&F Sides.
Makaya McCraven calls himself a beat scientist, so it's no surprise when you ask about his childhood, you hear he was pretty much surrounded by rhythm.
"Rehearsals at our house, banging on drums since I was able to hold a drumstick, sleeping in my dad's bass drum," he recalls. "There was no front head, and a little pillow in there. And you could just kinda go in and lay down if you're small enough."
Birds were singing on his mom's porch in the woods of Western Massachusetts when he connected for the interview. McCraven grew up there and also all over, living an international life. He was born in Paris to two artists: his dad, an American drummer, and his mom, a Hungarian singer. Giants of jazz were household names.
"Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, being around guys like Yusef Lateef," he remembers. "So those are my memories: being at gigs, being at concerts, backstage at a venue, smoky places, stowed away. My kids get similar [experiences] these days."
In 2018, Makaya McCraven released Universal Beings, a widely acclaimed double album. Now, a new documentary of the same name shows how he made it and he's gone back through the old material from that record to put out another album: Universal Beings E&F Sides.
NPR's David Greene spoke with Makaya McCraven about how he created a new album out of old recordings, the relationship between live and recorded music and his thoughts on the word "jazz." Listen in the audio player above and read on for a transcript of their conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Greene: I want to talk about the way you make albums. For instance, on "Half Steppin' " a track from your new album Universal Beings E&F Sides, people may not realize this is a mixture of live recordings and studio work. What's happening here?
Makaya McCraven: I just took lots of bits and pieces from a particular kind of jam, so to speak, and then layered some drums. I changed the pitch of stuff, and then I do some overdubbing as well. So it's kind of like a collage of what happened live in the moment in that space.
Those are kind of techniques that I use to create symbiosis between the live experience and then recontextualizing that for the recorded realm, which I consider kind of like an alternate dimension, in a way; that the music can exist differently than it can in our natural physical world. And I think that's kind of a magical space of the recorded platform, is that you can do so many things. Les Paul was creating tape loops; the Beatles were doing all sorts of creative ways of mixing things down and playing stuff backwards. And what can we do now to create sounds that never existed in the natural world — or repeat time?
As a kid, I remember, my dad liked action films and he'd have his buddies over and they'd watch a car chase. The car blows up and it rolls and everybody'd be like, "Whoa!"
"Gotta see that, again!"
"Turn it back," you know? What I am looking for are magical moments, particularly in the live space, because there are these fleeting moments that happen live sometimes; you just want to hold on to [them].
You clearly love the energy of live performances so much. How do you balance making all of those changes, taking us into this alternate space, without losing the energy and what you love so much about what's live?
You're going to lose it, some of it. It's like apples and oranges. I don't think the recorded platform can replace the experience of live music. Some of my favorite moments in live music or in performance can be silence. Say you're in a noisy club and there's people talking and something happens at the bandstand, and everybody starts paying attention. That in itself, just being together and sharing a moment brings a level of intensity. It's palpable. It's real.
And we're not experiencing it right now.
We're not experiencing it right now.
MAK ATTACK
Just listening to you describe this stuff. And it's like we're all missing those moments like the isolation of the last few months is like so the opposite.
It's such a strange time to process anything, particularly anything of the past that reminds us of the world as it used to be not so long ago. I still wake up often and I'm like "Wait, really? This is what's going on in the world?" Just these times are very intense in general. Whatever emotions you may be feeling now, whatever struggles you may be having now are amplified.
You call yourself a student of music first at the beginning of the documentary and you've studied jazz throughout your life. As we said, you grew up around some pillars of jazz. How do you feel about jazz in this moment and where it's headed?
Great, I guess. That can be quite a loaded question. I don't even know how well I feel about the word "jazz," though I still use it.
What makes you uncomfortable with it?
It has very racist roots, [for] one. It's totally inadequate in describing the breadth of music that has come out under its umbrella. And many of its founding players of the genre also took issue with the word as something that was not defined by them and was used to commodify their work. Miles Davis didn't like to call it jazz. Duke Ellington didn't like to call it jazz. Mingus didn't want to call it jazz. So I think of "jazz" — in quotes — as an aural tradition that you learn from playing and being around other people. And like aural traditions, they evolve and they move; it's not a stagnant thing for preservation. Like with an aural tradition, there's an actual physical touch. And that's where I feel fortunate to have been around a lot of elders. I always think of that as like trying to get a touch of the music and the history and the past that I can take with me as I create music, now, from my vantage point..
Universal Beings E&F Sides is out July 31 via International Anthem.
Bo Hamby and Taylor Haney produced and edited this interview.
Correction July 30, 2020
A previous version of this story stated that Universal Beings E&F Sides will be released on XL Recordings. It will be released on International Anthem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makaya_McCraven
Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven (born October 19, 1983) is an American jazz drummer and bandleader.[1][2]
He was born in Paris, France, to jazz drummer father Stephen McCraven and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, and from the age of three was raised in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.[3]
Discography
- Marlene Rosenberg Quartet (Marlene Rosenberg, Geoff Bradfield, Scott Hesse & Makaya McCraven) - Bassprint (2012)
- Split Decision (2012)
- In the Moment (2015)
- In the Moment Remix Tape (2015)
- Highly Rare (2017)
- Where We Come from (Chicago X London Mixtape) (2018)
- Universal Beings (2018)
- Antoine Berjeaut & Makaya McCraven - Moving Cities (2019)
- Gil Scott-Heron & Makaya McCraven - We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven (2020)
- Universal Beings E&F Sides (2020)
References
- "About Makaya McCraven". MakayaMcCraven.com
External links
- Makaya McCraven biography by Thom Jurek, discography and album reviews, credits & releases at AllMusic
- Makaya McCraven discography, album releases & credits at Discogs
- Makaya McCraven albums to be listened on Spotify
- Makaya McCraven songs & albums to be listened on YouTube
Makaya McCraven - Three Fifths a Man (Live @ Green Mill) w/ Jeff Parker, Justefan, Junius Paul
Makaya McCraven - Three Fifths a Man w/ Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Justin Thomas
Makaya McCraven | LIVE SET| Red Bull Studio Sessions
MAKYA MCCRAVEN AND JUNIUS PAUL: Worldwide Awards 2020
Makaya McCraven Boiler Room London Live Set
Makaya McCraven - In These Times - live at Le Guess Who? 2019
Makaya McCraven - Young Genius (Live at Lodge Room)
UNIVERSAL BEINGS
Makaya McCraven - North Sea Jazz Festival 2019
Makaya McCraven | LIVE SET| Red Bull Studio Sessions
Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings (2018)
Makaya McCraven Boiler Room London Live Set
Makaya - In the Moment Deluxe Edition (FULL ALBUM)
Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings E&F Sides (Full Album, 2020)
Makaya McCraven Boiler Room London Live Set
Gil Scott- Heron & Makaya McCraven - We're New Again - A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven (Full Album) (Deluxe Edition)
Makaya McCraven - Above & Beyond - Starlight Stage @Pickathon 2019 S05E01