Makaya McCraven has had a complicated and conflicted relationship with the word “jazz”. Like many past masters of the music, from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, the boundary-pushing American drummer, composer and “beat scientist” has challenged its use, arguing that it can limit its players and reduce them creatively, commercially and culturally.
“It has very racist roots, [for] one,” he told National Public Radio, in the US. “It’s totally inadequate in describing the breadth of music that has come out under its umbrella.”
McCraven prefers broader terms – “improvised music, black American music, whatever you want to call it”. In the 1990s he grew up seeing jazz dismissed by his peers as “old, corny, white ... going to get you beat up”, as he puts it on his website.
“Well, maybe getting beat up is a little bit of exaggeration,” the 42-year-old says from his home studio in Chicago when I remind him of the quote. “I don’t think there were roaming gangs of people looking for jazz nerds like me.
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“But jazz being uncool and unhip, that was definitely something I felt, and that even permeates today. Many younger jazz musicians still have an almost shameful attitude, or a self-deprecating humour, when regarding themselves or our music. Certain values in certain jazz spaces have turned elitist, or restricted access to certain groups of people. And I’ve always taken issue with that.”
With a background in “global folk traditions” and a fascination with sample-based hip-hop, McCraven is an innovator who, over the past two decades, has consistently pushed against received notions of jazz, intrepidly exploring the space between improvisation and composition, the individual and the collective, the live recording and the studio reinterpretation.
He has also been a key figure in a vibrant and revitalised international jazz scene that has done much to change perceptions and attract new audiences. It has made him something of a crossover star, equally at home playing compact club and DIY community centres as he is headlining capacious concert halls. In May he returns to Ireland for the first time in eight years, bringing an agile quartet to the National Concert Hall, in Dublin.
“He is a cultural synthesiser … [with] a unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders and blending past, present and future into polytextural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted, 21st-century folk music,” his website boldly states. It sounds prolix and overly cerebral, yet McCraven’s rhythm-and-beats-driven music often achieves the opposite: it is carefully constructed and winningly visceral.
He was born in Paris to the Hungarian folk singer and flautist Ágnes Zsigmondi and the African-American jazz drummer Stephen McCraven. When Makaya was three the family moved to the college town of Northampton in Massachusetts, where they became part of a creative community that included the saxophonist Archie Shepp and the multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef.
Banging on percussion instruments almost from the time he was able to hold a drumstick, McCraven was influenced both by the eastern European and gypsy music of his mother and by the widescreen and free-flowing approach to jazz adopted by his father, which often connected the music back to its African roots.
“The way my parents blended different styles and cultures has definitely influenced me tremendously,” McCraven says. “Not just in the music I make but also in their creative spirit – the idea of taking the fabric of what’s around you and moulding it into a new artistic vision.”
In McCraven’s eyes, however, such idealism was counterpointed by a steely realism. “Growing up, there were also times when I thought, ‘Is being a musician really a smart career path?’” he says. “There seemed to be too many insecurities and disappointments. And I could see how hard it was. So I put a lot of hours into practising, and playing every type of gig I could – reggae, rock, wedding bands, anything.”
It made him pragmatic, and even strategic, from an early age. By the time he was 13 McCraven had formed a backing band for his mother; by 16 he’d cofounded the energetic, jazz-influenced “live hip-hop band” Cold Duck Complex, which during the 2000s enjoyed some success, playing in New York and Boston, and opening for The Pharcyde and Wu-Tang Clan.
“We were a self-run grassroots band that had all our promos, demo CDs and a bank account together – and that really connected with a small but very loyal fan base: we had a following,” he says. “It was really the beginning of my professional career.”
McCraven studied at the University of Massachusetts Amherst off and on for five years, eventually majoring in jazz performance, but Cold Duck Complex and other opportunities constantly pulled him back to the bandstand.
In 2006 he left college, without graduating, to move to Chicago with his now wife, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a comparative race studies scholar who had been offered a position at Northwestern University. He didn’t waste time settling in.
“I really tried to hit the ground running,” he says. “I made lists of all the musicians in town that I was interested in meeting, all the different jazz clubs, where there were beatmakers doing live things, where every open-mic and jam session was. And I hit up everything.”
Soon he was connecting to such veterans of the Chicago jazz scene as the pianist Willie Pickens and the guitarist Bobby Broom, and with younger open-eared improvisers, including the guitarist Jeff Parker, a member of the celebrated Chicago postrock group Tortoise (who play the Button Factory, in Dublin, on November 3rd), and the trumpeter Marquis Hill, who is in the quartet McCraven is bringing to Dublin. He also played with Colombian, hip-hop, world-music, indie-rock and many other bands.
“There is this big, intense, vibrant, kind of incredible music scene here,” says McCraven, who is wearing a black hoodie with “Chicago” emblazoned across its front in red. “Chicago is a working-class city with no airs about it: people want to see you do the work and be committed, to see you be authentic. Which fits me really well. For the next six years I just was playing, playing, playing. But there was also space to feel you could create your own thing.”
What McCraven began to develop, aided by his association with the new and progressive Chicago jazz-and-beyond label International Anthem, was a kind of musical generative loop that combined his passion both for playing and for producing.
His starting point is often live, spontaneously improvised group recordings, usually made over an extended period, which feature McCraven’s singular jazz- and groove-based explorations but can also travel to forms such as funk, fusion, Afrobeat, reggae, electronica and soul.
McCraven takes this raw material – as much as 48 hours in the case of In the Moment, his breakthrough release from 2015, recorded over a year at a weekly club date in Chicago – and then “recontextualises” the music through a painstaking process of cutting, splicing, looping and layering.
He is searching for themes and moods, musical storylines, chance discoveries and happy accidents, a certain alchemy, the sound of the audience and the room. It is editing as composition, the studio as instrument.
“I dive into my ears and my skill set and my heart and what feels good, and I try to sculpt something,” he explains. “I’m looking for things that are surprising or out of the norm, something that’s unique. I’m just trying to get to things that I don’t know, things beyond my imagination.”
These collages become compositions that can be further developed in performance – or tracks that McCraven sequences for albums: Highly Rare, Where We Come From and last year’s Off the Record were created this way.
His ambitious 2018 release Universal Beings combined “augmented live sessions” in Chicago and New York with recordings from pop-up studios in London and Los Angeles; it also featured various communities and configurations of younger jazz stars, such as Nubya Garcia, Shabaka, Brandee Younger and Tomeka Reid.
McCraven has also remixed and reimagined Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, I’m New Here, and reworked material from the illustrious Blue Note Records archives on Deciphering the Message.
On his 2022 album, In These Times, he took some of his more conventionally written compositions, added orchestral arrangements for a large all-star ensemble, recorded the music live and in the studio, and then reshaped and reworked the results in post-production.
I ask if he feels his methods are part of a jazz tradition. “Well, jazz musicians in the past have sampled intros, outros and tag lines, and recorded standard tunes with new arrangements or different time signatures,” he replies. “But it’s nuanced. Within the tradition of my jazz heroes, I don’t play jazz. But then, in other ways, I’m very much a jazz musician – if I disregard my distaste for the word: I’m based in jazz, but I do creative music mixed with production.
“And I always take heed to the moment. Improvisation is key. It’s about sharpening your skills and having the breadth of knowledge and confidence to walk into any situation and be able to perform. Just like we all do every single day of our lives. It’s what it takes to navigate and move through the world.”
Makaya McCraven plays the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Thursday, May 7th
