MAKAYA McCRAVEN
In These Times
INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH
9/10
The Chicago drummer/producer/arranger mines the past to speak to the present. By Stephen Deusner
MAKAYA
McCRAVEN’s seventh album under his own name, In These Times, opens with the sound of applause and a swarm of strings that quickly coalesce into a galloping rhythm, and then something unexpected happens: a human voice asserts, somewhat mysteriously, “I never want to be known as anybody opposed to progress… It just kinda seems to me that nobody has the right to take away our responsibility to finish what these people have died for”. It’s a clip of Harry Belafonte speaking with broadcaster Studs Terkel for his Chicago Public Radio show, and the statement neatly encapsulates McCraven’s mission as a drummer, producer and arranger. He draws from the music of the past to comment on the present, which allows the album to bound gracefully from one idea to the next – from free jazz to classical, from soul music to hip-hop, from prog to minimalism.
Born in Paris, raised in Massachusetts and based in Chicago, McCraven is considered one of the leading lights of contemporary jazz, yet to call him simply a jazz musician understates the range of his playing and the scope of his vision. He favours the spontaneity of that genre, as well as the emotional heft of spiritual jazz, but often manipulates recorded performances to find something new within the music. As he cuts and pastes, the computer becomes an instrument in and of itself. Whether he’s piecing together his own compositions or reimagining those by Gil Scott-Heron (2020’s We’re New Again) or Blue Note recording artists (2021’s ), he favours dense textures and revelatory repetition, the kind of acute rhythmic variations that recall the fluttery avant-garde compositions of Philip Glass or Steve Reich and the local post-rock of Tortoise or The Sea & Cake.
