Words by Emma Warren

World-renowned drummer, beat-maker and composer Makaya McCraven is sitting on a battered red sofa at the Total Refreshment Centre in London.

He’s there with keys whizz and Londoner Joe Armon-Jones, chatting about his new album In These Times before sitting behind the drum kit for an improvised live set with Armon-Jones – something he prefers to describe as ‘spontaneous composition’.

So, what does it mean to be a musician in these times? He pauses, collecting his thoughts. “We’re always living in these times,” he says. “‘right now’ just keeps rolling. Time does not stand still for anyone.” 

The pair are in front of a brick wall in this Edwardian building, lit by a sun shape which is coming through an old-school projector, and they’re pressing into the music that they’re making. It begins carefully, rising and responding as the two musicians find their groove and build a relaxed, textured warmth that inspires head nods – and when it heats up into pure fire – cheers from the tiny audience of listeners. It’s a perfect illustration of their skill as musicians and of the kind of improvised sonic conversations that have informed McCraven’s acclaimed music so far.

“With my music, it’s less ‘does it make me move’ and more ‘does it move me?’,” he says a few weeks later from Chicago, where he lives. “Does it make me want to move my feet, or shed a tear, or get up and turn it off because it's too loud? I like to elicit some strong feeling.”

The ‘beat scientist’ and sonic collagist’s music is scooped up by record collectors – and increasingly, by film directors too. McCraven tunes were used on Netflix’s 2022 documentary Civil about lawyer Ben Crump, for which he co-composed the score, and he also wrote the soundtrack for Paint & Pitchfork, a documentary about visual artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald (they painted Barack and Michelle Obama’s portraits) which came out earlier this year. More generally, his music has helped build an explicit link between conservatoire-trained jazz musicians and those working in a hip hop lineage.

Growing up in a heavily musical family helped the former – his father is jazz drummer Stephen McCraven and his mother is Hungarian folk singer Agnes Zsigmondi – and time in a High School hip hop band called Cold Duck Complex (they supported Wu-Tang Clan and The Pharcyde) created foundations for the latter. His first albums brought the two together and were characterized by sampled recordings of improvised sessions which McCraven took into Ableton and turned into critically-acclaimed suites of music.

The music doesn’t just exist on record (although it is released on beautifully packaged vinyl) as evidenced by McCraven’s packed performance schedule. The translation from one form to another – from recording to live performance – is particularly complicated given all the production processes the music goes through between jam sessions and release, and McCraven’s penchant for constantly shifting the parameters, for example turning music recorded in trio form to a twelve-piece band including Brandee Younger’s always-gorgeous harp. 

“It's still really daunting to perform the record and I've worked really hard to rise to the occasion,” he says. “Some of the ideas I have, I get going, and then all of a sudden it's like, ‘well, whose idea was this, to have two interpretations? And then, you know, it's like, ‘well sir, it was your idea’.”

Previous releases, he says – particularly 2020’s Universal Beings – were ‘a collection of improvised Frankensteins, torn to bits and put back together’. “I have to take the productions and turn them into tunes,” he says. “I improvise, then I digitally make up things in the computer and sampler to make the final record, and then to perform it, I have to arrange that music for a band.”

McCraven’s work involves a lot of arrangement. He took a few traditional composition lessons at The University of Massachusetts Amherst before switching to higher education for the learnings available on stage and in session rooms. Most of his real schooling, he says. took place closer to home. “I’d listen to my parents’ records and rehearsal tapes, and see how things would get put together in real life. Being a fly on the wall as a session drummer, paying attention, asking questions and trying to learn certain things that are standard in arrangement, so that we can play together and communicate effectively with each other musically.”

McCraven released his first album In The Moment in 2015 on Chicago’s then-fledgling and now globally esteemed International Anthem label, followed by 2017’s Highly Rare, chopped up and produced from a single live performance in Chicago. Next was the Where We Come From (Chicago x London Mixtape), recorded at London’s Total Refreshment Centre and released in 2018. Later that year he released the double album Universal Beings which appeared on multiple Album of the Year lists. The following year brought his reinterpretation of Gil Scott Heron’s I’m New Here for XL Recordings as We’re New Again and in 2020 Universal Beings E&F Sides appeared as a vinyl release and as the soundtrack to Mark Pallman’s Universal Beings documentary.

The new record, In These Times (released in a suitably collaborative three-way fashion between International Anthem, XL and Nonesuch Records), contains songs that have been percolating in the background for nearly a decade. Whilst it’s newly recorded and released, some of the songs will be familiar to people who’ve seen McCraven play live over the years. As well as new material, it contains songs he’s played for several years at shows, including Lullaby, originally co-written by his mother. His generous and open-minded approach to music making sits firmly in the experimental lineage whilst also cleaving to what you might call ‘listenability’, as with the feeling-soaked title track or the very tender Dream Another. “When I tour, I've always played my own compositions as well – and that’s what In These Times is. Me taking the tunes that we've been playing for the last seven to ten years on the road.”

Staff at the newspaper had been researching Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and historian Studs Terkel, who collected oral histories of working Americans, and who died in 2008. McCraven was  interviewed by the newspaper for an article on the life of a working musician. “I gave a very honest, candid interview where I talked about how we stratify class in ways that most other careers don’t,” he says. “Like playing a festival and being wined and dined, and then running from the festival to downtown Chicago, putting a tie on in my car and playing, like, a 75th birthday party... Both those gigs pay the same, and you get treated like a completely different type of human being. It went a little viral, and I had musicians from all over the world hit me up and be like, ‘Wow, I've never had anybody really tell my life like this’. That’s what connected me to the title.” A sample from one of Studs Terkel’s radio shows marks the start of In These Times. 

The source material for the songs on In These Times includes performances at Chicago Symphony Centre, the grassroots-facing Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Post-production took place in a range of locations including hotel rooms and, once the pandemic hit, at his mother-in-law’s house in Hawaii and at his home in Chicago. The album also contains music recorded during a gig at the offices of In These Times, the economic justice newspaper and radio station that inspired the album title.

Back at Total Refreshment Centre, Makaya is on the red sofa, answering questions from the audience. He’s asked how much he thinks about the future, and about newness. Makaya answers, talking about new technology, pointing out that the drum kit was once new technology – one that birthed modern music as we know it – and that Miles Davis was ‘cutting up tracks for Bitches Brew… this is part of the tradition.’

There’s a discussion about artists sounding like themselves, and how good it is to hear musicians who draw on their own unique perspectives and present that through their music. “That’s what all the cats used to say, ‘find your sound’”, he says. “That’s jazz. Find your sound – and know your shit.”