Jazz drummer Makaya McCraven is bringing Jazz into new territory. He speaks to us ahead of his much anticipated gig at the National Concert Hall this May.
Makaya McCraven is an innovator steeped in the tradition of jazz who sees evolution as part of that tradition. On his debut album, In the Moment he pioneered a technique of music making that draws from the production values of Hip-Hop and fuses it with live jazz, samples, and beats. It’s a sonic fabric woven from all the disparate threads of Afro American music. He’s celebrated past masters on his Blue Note tribute, Deciphering the Message and soared creative heights on his masterpiece, In These Times. Totally Dublin caught up with him ahead of his eagerly anticipated NCH appearance on May 7th.
Your father Stephen McCraven is himself a renowned drummer who has played with Yusef Lateef, Freddie Hubbard and most notably Archie Shepp. What impact did this upbringing and environment have on your own artistic development?
A lot, I mean, it really sparked my love of music early on. It was a great opportunity to see that world and to play and jam with some people at a young age. There was an extended musical family, where a lot of different cats would be popping in and out at home for jam sessions, and people like Archie Shepp who taught me about the oral tradition of this music.
While still in high school you formed your first band Cold Duck Complex, named after the famous Eddie Harris tune “Cold Duck Time”. It was a band that fused socially conscious hip hop with jazz in songs like “Wake Up” whose lyrics, “We want peace, but only when peace turns a profit”, are perhaps even more relevant today than when they were written.
Yeah, we entered a battle of the bands and we won, and we started to play shows all over Western Massachusetts, and we ended up with a rapper from our high school. We opened for all kinds of hip-hop acts like The Pharcyde, Digable Planets, and The Wu-Tang Clan…
Do you see your music as being as socially and politically engaged now as it was then?
Absolutely, I’m not a lyricist, but I am speaking with music, action and intent. I think this music, Black Music, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop, and all indigenous folk music, speaks to our hearts in a certain way. Miles Davis once said in an interview that instead of calling it jazz, he liked to call it “social music”, and I really like that way of thinking about it. It’s music that is steeped in tradition, but that’s also engaging with and responding to what’s happening at this time.
In 2006 you moved to Chicago, immersing yourself in the scene there, playing alongside local stalwarts Marquis Hill and Jeff Parker, and ultimately signing up with the International Anthem label.
When I moved to Chicago I really hit the ground running and got to play with so many great players, people like Corey Wilkes and Ernest Dawkins, and in so many different scenes. It’s such a rich environment there and very open to all kinds of experimentation. It wasn’t just jazz, there were bands like Wilco too, and I remember cats like “Chance the Rapper” when they were still in high school. I was coming in as this young guy trying to play with as many different cats as I could, while building my own studio and working on my own projects.
In the Moment, your debut album, was the first International Anthem release that I heard, and it was the second ever release on the label. It’s an album that very much sign posts the past, present, and future of music, with its use of live, sampled, and remixed music, all woven together into an organic whole. Could you tell us how it came about?
I see the album as part of the tradition of artists trying out new things with technology, and utilizing the studio to see what’s possible. For me as an emerging artist, I was really interested in how hip-hop was being made, and how different producers like Madlib and J Dilla were using samplers and the studio as another instrument. I wanted to make beats, so I hung out with DJs and producers. I started doing a series of weekly gigs with Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, Matt Ulery and other cats in a basement room that used to be a bank vault. It was an intimate lounge room with a few tables and couches, and a small audience.
We started documenting all the performances. I brought the recordings home and began manipulating them in the studio. It happened kind of naturally, and I said, “Wow, this is cool!” And, we found a great partnership with the International Anthem who said, “Do this!” They hadn’t even put out a record yet, so, it was the inception of their thing too.
Your method is reminiscent of how Miles Davis worked with his producer Teo Macero, where musicians were invited to play in the studios and follow Miles’s, often cryptic, instructions. The recordings were later spliced together to produce such seminal works as “Biches Brew” and “One the Corner”. Do you see yourself as part of that lineage?
There’s definitely a relationship there, maybe not exactly with that method, but sure it’s been a huge influence and my work has been compared to it, and I am doing something kind of similar but different.
Are you bringing hip-hop into jazz or jazz into hip hop? Is your current work a fusion of both?
To me it’s not even like hip-hop per se, hip-hop inspired my interest in production and innovation, in technology, and new spaces in music, all of that connects with my love of being in the studio and recording, and this is the path that has been developing for me.
On your album Deciphering the Message you were given full access to the Blue Note catalogue to remix and reimagine some of the deeper cuts from their vaults like Hank Mobley’s “A Slice of the Top” along with tunes by lesser known artists like Elmo Hope. You strike me as a kind of audio-archaeologist excavating a lot older music and re-presenting it in a brilliantly contemporary way. Is there a new audience discovering jazz through hip-hop?
When I was coming up, being a jazz musician was kind of uncool, that was the vibe, and when I was playing in a lot of jazz clubs with a lot of different artists, they weren’t places where I was meeting cats my own age, but when I started going in to the Beats scene and meeting producers, I was checking them out, and they were like, “Wow, you play real drums!” And then I realized that some of the DJs were actually bigger music heads and bigger jazz fans than people in the jazz clubs. They often knew more about the records and the personnel than the club cats did, and so I found a whole new group of people who were really interested in jazz.
I’ve met quite a few younger record collectors, people in their late twenties, who’ve discovered Blue Note records and the music of Lee Morgan and Art Blakey through listening to “Deciphering the Message”. It’s very exciting to think of that classic music finding a new audience through such a contemporary medium…
Well, I think it’s important to celebrate the past and all the things that have set the bar, they are an example for us as we keep on moving towards the future, and building on what came before. We are not going to do the same thing, but we are standing on the shoulders of the past, and innovation is a part of the tradition. It’s a challenging thing in an everchanging world to hold on to our roots and our music.
In These Times your 2022 album was released just as we were emerging from the worst of the pandemic, it was, for me, like a sonic hug after the isolation, it seemed to soar after all the confinement, and it flooded me with a real sense of hope. It is like your “Revolver” moment where you lay out your stall and display all the styles, classical, jazz, ambient, and beats that you have woven into one seamless whole…
I’m grateful for that, I definitely wanted to make something beautiful, by that I mean something uplifting, they were very dark times.
Was there a double entendre in the album title, referring to both the political times, and the multiple time signatures in the music itself?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you record all your concerts, in the sense of you collecting fresh material for you to later manipulate in the studio?
No, not exactly, I tour often and play the music from my records, and we use that as a vehicle for improvisation, but when I am recording for new material, I often do special intimate concerts that are completely improvised, in smaller, acoustic venues.
So, what can we expect to hear when you play the NCH in May?
Most likely we’re going to be playing from the repertoire from our latest album “Off The Record, and stuff from In These Times and In the Moment, there’ll be improvised jams too.
Right now there’s so much that’s fake and false, and you can’t tell what’s real, but when we’re together in a real space with people in numbers, it’s really powerful, it’s transcendent. And something I do in the show is to go into complete silence, it’s really meaningful when we’re all gathered together.”
Words: Billy O’Hanluain
Makaya McCraven plates The National Concert Hall on May 7th.
