Print detail event | Makaya McCraven

Makaya McCraven

Sunday 2/18/24
at 4 pm

Drummer Makaya McCraven “has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality” (New York Times). His most recent album, In These Times, has been singled out as one of the best jazz albums by the New York Times, Pitchfork, Stereogum, NPR and others.

Born in Paris and raised in the Amherst, Massachusetts area, McCraven grew up in a household where he was immersed in music. As a child he quickly took to drums, the instrument of his father, Stephen McCraven, jazz drummer who was in the bands of Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef.

He is also strongly influenced by the music of his mother, a Hungarian singer and flutist, who fused Eastern European folk melodies (many in odd meters) with the music that surrounded her in her new, adopted homeland.

McCraven attended UMass Amherst as a music student and formed and recorded with a band called Cold Duck Complex. He later moved to Chicago, where he joined Bobby Broom’s trio and became quickly recognized as a drummer capable of a performing at a high level in a wide variety of styles including jazz, hip-hop, folkloric music and rock.

Now a mature musician, McCraven has evolved into one of the most unique and influential voices of his generation. His records are grooving conceptual projects. For his first two albums he recorded, sampled and remixed his own band, much like what Teo Marcero and Miles Davis did on Bitches Brew, creating organic soundscapes and rhythmical tapestries that defied previous conceptions.

In 2020 he recreated the music of a famed release by Gil Scott Heron called I’m New Here respectfully combining Heron’s material with a twenty-first century sensibility.

In 2021 he released a project for Blue Note Records called Deciphering the Message where he was given free-reign of their legendary catalogue to create beats. He used samples of masters like Cedar Walton and Art Blakey to seamlessly (and again respectfully) develop their material using his own creative directions.
At the Jazz Center, McCraven will show up and surprise us with his magical-sounding offerings that combine acoustic jazz with electric beats, straight-ahead tunes and spontaneous compositions.

With Marquis Hall,trumpet
& Junius Hall, bass