Makaya McCraven: Jazz's Beat Scientist Remixes The Moment

Makaya McCraven — drummer, composer, producer, and “beat scientist” — identifies as a jazz musician, though he embodies the “post-genre moment,” as he puts it. He merges live improvisation with hip-hop production and electronic manipulation. Typically, he and his band will jam out in a club, improvising from scratch. He records the performance, takes the recording into the studio, and identifies those moments when creative lightning struck. Then he samples, chops, loops, and overdubs to create an entirely new piece of music which he releases as an album.

He samples himself, an unusual approach.

He calls the studio “a dream realm.” What happens inside it “is another kind of improvisation. For me, improvisation is just the natural state of being. We’re living in the moment, barreling into the unknown, and making choices for the future.”

He also releases a lot of music, almost always on the Chicago-based International Anthem label, home to a sizable portion of the genre-bending jazz and experimental improvised music of the moment. One of the label’s stars, he seems to have no fear of flooding the market. Last fall, he released four EPs — Techno Logic, The People’s Mixtape, Hidden Out!, and PopUp Shop — which now have been collected on a double-album titled Off the Record. His collaborators for this and other projects tend to be on-the-rise players from the jazz scenes in Los Angeles, London, New York and Chicago, where he has lived for the past 20 years.

McCraven, 42, was born in Paris in 1983 and grew up in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, around the college towns of Northampton and Amherst. His mother is Hungarian folk musician Ágnes Zsigmondi, a flutist and singer from whom he learned that music performed in odd meters can feel natural and danceable. His father is drummer Stephen McCraven who played in the bands of jazz geniuses like Archie Shepp, Marion Brown and Yusef Lateef. All three taught at colleges in the Pioneer Valley when Makaya was growing up; Shepp was a family friend. Coming from this background, he retains a strong connection to jazz tradition — its spirit and intent — even as he has gone on to explore the worlds of hip-hop production and technology.

Now a Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ, McCraven will perform four shows this month (5/21-24) at Miner Auditorium. (The 5/22 performance will be streamed live at sfjazz.org.) He will lead a large ensemble — ten-plus pieces, including strings — in an exploration of his 2022 album In These Times, plus new repertoire he continues to develop in its wake.

McCraven holds the album close to his heart, calling it his “most comprehensive work.”

It stands apart from the rest of his catalogue. Crucially, it was not sampled and built from bits and pieces of purely improvised performances. Rather, it spotlights his compositions — his “penmanship,” as he says, proudly.

He composed and performed the album’s tunes over the course of a decade, while gradually increasing the size of his ensemble. A commission from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis brought the project to fruition: He performed In These Times there in 2019. Soon after, he performed the album at Symphony Center in Chicago. Both performances were recorded, as were some studio run-throughs of his compositions. Finally, McCraven took the tapes of all these performances back into the studio, though his production work was far more minimal than on his other albums. “Ultimately,” he says, the album “is just performances of these tunes I’ve written.”

At SFJAZZ, McCraven will perform portions of the album along with new material developed by his “In These Times band,” which is what he calls the ensemble. It will include some of his most frequent collaborators including bassist Junius Paul, trumpeter Marquis Hill, cornetist and rapper Ben LaMar Gay, saxophonist Greg Ward, guitarist Matt Gold and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, all of whom have led or appeared on International Anthem recordings.

They form a community with a shared vocabulary, creating music with a distinguishable sound — music that is alive and growing. Significantly, in 2021, McCraven produced the album Deciphering the Moment, a collaboration between International Anthem and Blue Note Records. Blue Note opened its vaults to McCraven who remixed and reimagined classic recordings by Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley and others. Talk about a community of musicians with a shared vocabulary — Blue Note was it.

I recently spent an hour on the phone with McCraven, who was home in Chicago. We talked about his jazz roots, sampling, connections between bebop and hip-hop, his album In These Times, and lots more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length — though it hasn’t been remixed or reimagined. It’s just Makaya McCraven, talking about his life in music.

Q: You’ve made a lot of good records. But you seem to take special pride in In These Times. Why do you feel so connected to it?

A: I feel it’s my most comprehensive work — something that features my writing and my tunes and not just my production. And as a drummer, it’s getting more toward rhythmic concepts which I perform often, utilizing odd meters and a certain creative concept. With a lot of the other records, the process of improvisation and sampling make them a little more beat-driven, a little loopier. This music is different.

Q: You're famous for improvising live sets, often in a club. You’ll record the show, then chop and sample the tape like crazy to make something new — which you’ll release on record.

In These Times is different. Will you explain how?

A: In These Times has production. It has some chopping and sampling and flipping source materials in the studio. What’s different is this: I’d say that 85 percent of the album is my writing — my compositions, my penmanship — extrapolated to a large ensemble, a heavily string-orchestrated live group. It wasn’t born out of improvised recordings like some of the other records. Ultimately, it is just performances of these tunes I’ve written.

And In These Times has now turned into a band. This is an ongoing project. It’s my large ensemble, a more orchestrated kind of group, which can go from experimental to classical sounds to jazz and fusion and in between. It was born through the process of making In These Times.

Q: Creating the album was a lengthy process.

A: It was a ten-year project. I was already working on it pretty much when I started making records. I was already performing some of the tunes with my trio and small groups.

Q: You’re talking about tunes that wound up on In These Times.

A: Yes, I was already playing the tune “Lullaby,” which is actually a tune off one of my mother’s records. And I was playing several of my own tunes which also became part of the album — years later. It happened inch by inch. The success of In the Moment (his first album for International Anthem, released in 2015) spurred a whole new line of gigs for me. And around the time of Universal Beings (2018), I started having opportunities to lead a bigger band. And after getting the commission for In These Times from the Walker Art Center (in Minneapolis), it became an even bigger project — following the wind as it blows.

I never knew I’d be leading groups like this, incorporating ten or more people with strings. I never knew the ensemble would be playing In These Times at classical halls like the Walker and the Chicago Symphony Center and the Barbican (in London) and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville and Orchestral Hall in Detroit — all these more pristine venues other than rock and jazz clubs.

Having the opportunity to play at SFJAZZ fits right in line with all that.

Q: You’ll have four shows in Miner Auditorium, the concert hall at the SFJAZZ Center. What’s the repertoire?

A: We’ll play some music from In These Times along with new material. We’re going to switch the sets up night to night to give us some different spaces to explore.

I call it the In These Times band, but now we’re playing new music. Until now, we’ve been playing mostly music off the record. But now I have the opportunity to take this further. I want to continue this project and continue to introduce new music and to develop and tighten new repertoire. That’s what I intend to do at SFJAZZ.

It’s difficult to make music at this scale. So these opportunities are the wind I need to make these dreams come alive — dreams I didn’t even know I had.

Q: My understanding is that you’ll record the SFJAZZ shows, take the recordings back to the studio, chop and sample them and eventually release a new album, or albums. Is that right?

A: Yes, that’s what I intend, though I still haven’t dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s with all the people involved.

Q: With the musicians in the band?

A: No, with management!

But that’s my intent: to make something new directly from the recordings of the shows, or to use the performances as structure for writing new compositions and materials. Either way, it’s about using change and improvisation and being in the moment to create the unexpected.

Q: Do you feel you improvise as much in the studio as in live performances?

A: At all times. That’s the improvisational spirit: We’re always improvising. For instance, the ideas and structure for a composition come out of thin air. And in the studio, we’re using that as fodder for whatever will be next.

What I do in the studio is experimental — using studio techniques to make cool things, overdubbing or looping or whatever. It’s very open-ended. I’m just trying to make music and utilize a variety of techniques. And I’m into technology and I think it puts a little twist on the sound of it.

Q: In a way, your overall process is like large-scale looping. I mean that metaphorically. You’ve got this super-loop going: You go from live jazz improvisation to hip-hop production. Then you take the newly produced material and arrange it for live performance — in other words, you get it ready for more live jazz improvisation which you may then record and take back into the studio again. It’s a cycle, a big loop.

A: Recorded music is like this, in general. Especially with improvisation and something that’s not completely written out — once you’ve recorded it, it’s solidified and becomes part of the canon for a generation that gets to understand the style. It becomes part of the language, and people keep playing it and playing it and making little changes here and there — sampling it, in a cultural sense.

But now we’re sampling recordings with technology. We’re in this post-genre moment. You’re overdubbing this and chopping that. It’s not entirely new. I mean, the Beatles were making cuts on tape, and back on Blue Note Records in the early days, there’s so much stuff that wouldn’t sound the way it does outside the room.

Q: Outside the studio?

A: Yeah, it’s like a dream realm that doesn’t exist outside that room.

What goes on in the studio is another kind of improvisation. For me, improvisation is just the natural state of being. We’re living in the moment, barreling into the unknown, and making choices for the future. Like when you’re playing a jazz tune, you’re following the form, but it’s happening in real time and you’re making all these choices, moving forward. The first words you put down, they’ve come from somewhere.

Q: The first words? Do you mean, the first notes?

A: Either one. If you’re writing an essay, a journalistic essay, you’ve got a blank piece of paper in front of you. Where do those words come from? That’s your improvisation.

Q: That’s true. As a writer, you kind of just sit there until the first words pop into your head.

A: You’re making choices in real time. For me, improvising in music and leaving space for the unknown is opening myself up to that reality and stepping into it, accepting it. Everything is in real time. That’s the great thing about rhythm. We’ve only got one way of keeping track of this abstract idea of time. We put a beat to it. Tick of the clock. That’s the best we can do to make sense of this abstract thing.

Q: I listened to your interview with Leo Sidran on his podcast The Third Story. You discussed how Charlie Parker and other musicians in the bebop era would use the underlying harmonies of a popular song to create an entirely new song. The technical term for that new song is a contrafact. And you were discussing how the making of contrafacts is kind of like modern studio production — like sampling. In the studio, you take the source materials from an existing piece of music, flip them around, and make something new.

So, is sampling kind of a jazz thing?

A: Yeah, to me it’s a similar thing. I had a composition teacher, and I remember him talking about writing music and coming at me as a drummer: “The song is the melody and the chord changes. And the rhythm is the rhythm.” That always stuck with me, especially as a drummer who wants to compose and be a band leader.

And one thing I love about jazz is, yeah, the song is the chord changes and the melody. And coming up in the ‘90s and early 2000s, you’d take this standard and switch the time around — put it in 7 or put it in 11. In a lot of modern jazz writing, the arrangements were becoming the songs. But what’s great about the jazz standard and the classic Song Book is you can change it, you can put in these hits, little rhythmic alterations, and the song is still the song. So I started thinking about remixing these songs I had — but that’s really what cats were always doing, by putting this little intro on it, or making it into kind of a Latin thing. But the song is still the song, and that’s something I intended for a couple of tunes on In These Times. Like one of them has a fast 11/8 feel, but we can play it in 3 or 4 and it’s still gonna be that song. So it’s this idea of remixing and reusing. Bebop and contrafacts – it’s not that far off from things that were happening in hip-hop. It’s just from a different context.

Q: That’s so interesting to me. I got into jazz around 1969 or 1970, and when I listen to In These Times, I hear so many echoes. For instance, your album never sounds like Archie Shepp. But on a couple of your tunes, the strings come in and I get the shivers; there’s something about the spirit of it that reminds me of Shepp’s The Cry of My People. Or sometimes your bass player, Junius Paul, has an isolated moment that has a quiet reverence to it — kind of like something that might happen on an old Pharoah Sanders album. Or there’s a groove that reminds me of Alice Coltrane. Or there’s a mood that reminds me of a soul track from 1970 or ‘71 — Marvin Gaye or someone. But along with all that, you’ve got your beats and your studio production, all the influences of hip-hop and electronic pop music.

Listening to the record, it feels like the old is new and the new is old. Do you know what I mean?

A: I definitely am trying to touch all those notes. I appreciate those words.

As much as I like to do things in non-traditional ways or push up against the old guard or tradition, in other ways I'm very much an old soul and an old-school head. And I feel I came up just at the crux of a serious generation shift, by getting to be around some of the old guard, but it was right before the internet took over. And today I’m looking to the future, but I’m still trying to be informed from the past.

And one of the things I'm interested in is how music connects to people and culture and what it is about music that stands the test of time and is timeless. Sometimes in the modern music world, you’re trying to keep up with all the new sounds and new techniques, and sometimes you can miss some of the simplicity and things that are beautiful. That’s not just nostalgia. It’s because those things work. And all of a sudden, here's all this new technology stuff and it's like, “Well, let’s abandon that old stuff.” But maybe there’s some wisdom in that older approach. It’s not always a clear answer. There’s been a lot of retro things in the last 20 or more years and there’s a lot of looking back. But with all the looking back and preservation, people get into imitating the style instead of investigating the intent of what that music was trying to do. So I'm definitely trying to invoke the past, but not in terms of imitation.

Q: Tell me a little more about your relationship to tradition: the jazz tradition, but beyond jazz, too. For instance, your connection to your mother’s music, Hungarian folk music.

A: From the Eastern European folk songs that my mom sings that can make me cry to avant-garde jazz from the ‘60s and the Black Power movement to hip-hop or a Second Line funeral — I’ve been around to witness so many diverse musical moments and I’m curious to find out how can I incorporate that in my work.

Q: You’d like to incorporate the feeling of those experiences?

A: Yes, feeling and intent. There are things that are cross-cultural. There’s a lot of conversation about jazz and what it is and is jazz dead or is it coming back. But true musicians are much broader than genres. And jazz musicians have traditionally been curious and kind of like ethnomusicologists, learning more about their instruments and crafts and being able to play with people across the world. To me, that’s part of the tradition. Bossa nova was the new thing at one point and now it’s part of the canon of jazz. And whether you’re talking about Duke Ellington or Miles Davis — they questioned the need for that term, jazz. From Mingus to Monk to Coltrane, they’re interested in music from around the world. Miles wound up doing hip-hop with drum machines. So I feel it’s part of the culture to be in this debate, this conversation, about moving the music forward.

Q: Tell me about your childhood. Your dad played with Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers, and Shepp was a family friend. Growing up, you knew Marion Brown and Yusef Lateef. Can you paint a picture of what it was like to be in your house?

A: (Laughter) When you’re a kid, those people are just your parents’ peers. It’s not necessarily that special at the time. It was a funny area where I grew up. At my pre-school through elementary school up to college, a friend of mine was Kurt Vonnegut’s grandson. I didn't know who Kurt Vonnegut was. He was my friend’s weird grandpa. Sam (Rivers) was around a lot when I was a baby, when I was born in France. When I was a little kid in Massachusetts, in the Pioneer Valley, we used to go to Marion’s house often. My mom was friends with his girlfriend at the time, and I knew his son Djinji and Marion used to give me butterscotch candies all the time.

Shepp was probably around the most. I remember him coming by for Thanksgiving one time. (Pause.) Which means you’re waiting! (Laughs.)

Q: That rings a bell. I remember waiting a couple of hours for Archie Shepp to arrive at one of his concerts.

A: These cats are interesting folks. I got to see stuff. After turning 21 and being a little older and starting to go to Europe on my own, I went to see Shepp and told him I’d moved to Chicago. And I remember him telling me to find Willie Pickens. (Pickens, a pianist, was one of the great elders of the Chicago jazz scene.) Which I did. And Willie Pickens became one of my mentors, along with other folks. Willie and (saxophonists) Von Freeman and Fred Anderson — it was incredible to find them here and meet all these cats. I came from this small community of elders in the Pioneer Valley. But when I got to Chicago, it was like, “Wow!” It wasn’t like there were just some interesting cats in a small town. There’s a whole major influential scene and culture. But I feel that growing up among guys like my dad and Marion and Archie — it kind of gave me the impetus to come here and make it as a musician.

Q: Growing up, did you play with your father or Marion or Archie Shepp or Yusef Lateef? Did you ever gig with any of the elders in the community?

A: I’ve got video of me when I was like seven years old and doing a master class at school with Archie and my dad and my mom. And we’re swinging the blues and my dad is using the brush on a metal music stand, like a shuffle. And I'm hitting a little wood block with a stick. And Archie is playing saxophone and singing the blues – you’ve heard Archie sing the blues? And later, I remember playing the Iron Horse (a club in Northampton, MA) with Archie’s band, or maybe it was my dad’s quartet with Archie in it.

I remember playing with (bassist) Nat Reeves. And one time I subbed at a UMass Amherst faculty concert, a tribute to Dr. Billy Taylor. Yusef was playing as a guest and I got to play with him there. He’s got albums that are some of my favorites, ever. Oh, man! I said to him, very politely, “Hello, Mr. Lateef.” And he says, “I know your father, right?” Oh my God! He knows! And we played a blues and that was a special moment. I was like 19 or something like that.

When I got to UMass, I remember that Yusef would come every week and get his oboe lessons with a fine conservatory player they had at the school. I mean, here comes this 80-year-old legend. People worship his ground and he had the humility to take these lessons.

So I knew all these guys in the Pioneer Valley and I knew what they were doing in Europe and I knew about their influence. It was kind of off the beaten path, the way I was with Shepp and Yusef and Marion. I feel like I grew up in a different little enclave of the jazz world. And I felt that by moving to Chicago, there would be a lot of people who’d understand me as opposed to New York, which felt a little more straight and commercial.

Q: Let’s talk about your label, International Anthem. It represents a lot of what’s happening right now in a certain corner of jazz and experimental improvised music. Almost all your albums are on that label. Even when you’ve done projects with major labels like Blue Note or Nonesuch, you’ve always made it a co-partnership with International Anthem.

Why do you feel that kind of loyalty to the label? Have they given you the room to be the artist you want to be?

A: You could definitely say that International Anthem gave me the room to become the artist I’m still trying to become. For me, it’s never been just a traditional artist-label relationship. When I met Scottie and David, there was no International Anthem, no label. (Scott McNiece and David Allen founded International Anthem in 2014.)

Scottie was a young guy putting on events around the city — improvisational events, very DIY — and I got involved. And when he told me that he was interested in starting a label, I was like, “Yeah, that’s dope. I’ll do something for you.” So I’ve been there since the beginning. I’ve been a consultant on some things, officially or not officially, in addition to doing my own things. The relationship is a little more than what you have at most labels. If I want to do projects anywhere else, they support me and we want to see each other do well. I think we’ll stay related to each other, no matter how things happen in the future. International Anthem is very artist-forward and artist-friendly. It’s about creating a community and growing the community, and I believe in that. We have a niche to grow, rather than fighting over things.

With all the talk of the last 20 years that jazz is dead and how can we ever have a market again — sometimes there’s a lot of infighting and competition between labels and groups. But we try and take the approach of building it up, cross-collaborating, so labels can work together even if they’re basically competitors.

Q: A friend said to me that years from now, we’ll look back and see the influence of International Anthem. He likened it to the way we now look back at Impulse! Records and other forward-thinking labels of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What do you think?

A: I’ve heard people make those comparisons to Impulse! or Blue Note — the early Blue Note days. I think that’s interesting. We’re in a different moment, a different time. The industry is different; it’s a whole different beast. But if we talk in terms of influence and who’s making progressive moves and giving a platform to forward-looking artists, I can see the comparison. Maybe. Time will tell.

Makaya McCraven's week as SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director runs 5/21-24. Tickets and more information are available here. The 5/22 performance will be streamed live. More information here.

A staff writer at SFJAZZ, Richard Scheinin is a lifelong journalist. He was the San Jose Mercury News' classical music and jazz critic for more than a decade and has profiled scores of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa and the Dalai Lama.