A couple months back I got to see one of my musical heroes in concert, the drummer, composer, and self-described “beat scientist” Makaya McCraven. The experience has stayed with me.
Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of another drummer/composer, Max Roach. Because Roach taught at University of Massachusetts Amherst for much of the last third of his life, his centenary got a little extra attention here in western Mass, where I happened to move last year.
Turns out, McCraven himself hails from this region. So his February 18 performance at the nearby Vermont Jazz Center (nestled within a repurposed 1911 cotton mill on the Connecticut River) was effectively a hometown show. His mom was in the audience; three of his current Chicago compatriots shared the stage.
McCraven is actually the offspring of musicians, parents whose abiding passions for jazz and global folk musics—to say nothing of odd song meters—informed his own. His mom, Ágnes Zsigmondi McCraven, grew up in Hungary, where she played with several folk ensembles and in the late 1970s recorded three albums as flutist and lead singer with group Kolinda. Building her solo career, she moved to Paris after meeting Stephen McCraven, an American jazz drummer who records and performs under his own name and at that time worked extensively with the jazz icons Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Sam Rivers, Yusef Lateef, and Jemeel Moondoc. With young Makaya on the scene, the couple relocated to Northampton, Mass, near Stephen’s home turf. In this region, fertile in so many ways, Makaya would grow up and embrace his future as a musician before transplanting himself to the expanding music universe of Chicago.
On his early recordings, McCraven showcases his arts of editing and sonic juxtaposition, cutting together choice moments of recorded live performance and weaving them together with spoken-word samples and other sounds. If those records are juicy, dense, and deliciously unpredictable on account of this, they can also feel like pastiche, a discontinuous parade of ideas. In concert, however, McCraven & co. go deep on each song, bringing continuity while exploring the melodic, rhythmic, and textural possibilities at hand.
While to me McCraven’s music is unquestionably “jazz,” his compositions and arrangements do not swing in an old-school traditional sense. Yet the harmonic makeup and balance of composed / improvised parts all reflect aspects of the living jazz tradition. McCraven’s style builds on the busy, polyrhythmic approach popularized by the great Elvin Jones (best known for his time in John Coltrane’s classic quartet), incorporating the punchy, insistent snare of hop-hop and syncopated rim shots suggestive of the broken-beat (bruk) style that bubbled out of UK dance music.
McCraven may be bandleader, but headlining is by no means a vanity move; everyone he plays with is leader at one time or other, and that was true in February. McCraven’s band has no fixed roster, but the bassist Junius Paul is a constant. This show featured Paul on acoustic and electric basses alongside the trumpet player Marquis Hill and a harp player, Brandee Younger.
Harp? Yes indeed. Brandee is a contemporary virtuoso furthering the jazz-harp tradition pioneered by Casper Reardon, Adele Girard, Daphne Hellman, Dorothy Ashby, Corky Hale, and Alice Coltrane. (Her sixth and latest album, Brand New Life, is largely tribute to Ashby.) At times Younger’s instrument sounds like a piano. Most often, though, her harp is simply its cascading classical self, a waterfall of color in the ensemble’s river of sound.
Many of the songs are ballads; all are performed with quiet precision, requiring exceptional breath control of Hill’s trumpet playing.
Younger was integral to the evening's high point, “Lullaby,” an Eastern-European folk song written by Ágnes McCraven and Kolinda’s Péter Dabasi. Makaya’s recorded version features Younger and appears on his most recent opus, In These Times. (Ágnes’s version can be found on her 1992 CD Water Woman, reissued in 2000 and available on Bandcamp.) Younger led the concert “Lullaby” with a hypnotic, meandering intro based on the melody. It’s the sort of melody you can hear over and over and still want more, like Ravel’s Bolero or, for that matter, Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Hill restated the melody in crisp, pure tones before handing the song back to Younger and then Paul for their solos.
I’ve found no YouTube footage of this particular quartet, but this 2021 performance by a McCraven sextet does feature Hill, Younger, and Paul:
A Rolling Stone profile mentions that McCraven played football. That physicality comes through onstage: his body is in constant motion. He tends to play dead on the beat rather than behind or in front of it. He’s all about the exacting pulse: rhythm and counterrhythm and inter-rhythm, finding freedom inside of strictly measured time. Dynamics are a big part of his sound, too, bringing needed variation within that strict time. He’ll be playing quietly, then punctuate the music with incredibly hard individual hits, then, in a heartbeat, flip back to quiet play.
On his Blue Note Records album Deciphering the Message, McCraven remixed and embellished the guitarist Kenny Burrell’s 1958 recording of Vernon Duke’s “Autumn in New York,” morphing it into “Spring in Chicago” with new parts for Marquis Hill, flutist/saxist De’Sean Jones, and vibraphonist Joel Ross. It’s that particular “reworked” version of “Autumn in New York” that McCraven played at this concert, stretching it to nearly 13 minutes with solos for bass, trumpet, and those wondrous crests and eddies of the ensemble. McCraven even layered in a voice sample over a quiet part of their performance: the same recording of the author Studs Terkel (“I never want to be known as anyone opposed to progress…”) that he mixed into the studio recording of the song “In These Times.”
In other words: McCraven the beat scientist still gets pride of place, even when his alter ego is wielding drum sticks.
They ended the evening with “In These Times,” which, like the album it comes from, is named after the progressive Chicago magazine started in 1976. Appropriately, the piece brings both beauty and turbulence, uncertainty and hope. It culminates in uproar—an end of times or maybe a new beginning. I prefer to think it’s a new start.
It affirms life to witness an event like this performance.
Collaboration this close—something unique to these four people, filling an old brick factory with joy and beauty—is nothing short of heroic. To see it in person, in real time, was a gift I cherish.
If you’re in the States you’ll be able to catch McCraven at NYC’s Blue Note Jazz Club this coming July.
Related reading and listening
Universal Beings (a 26-minute documentary about Makaya McCraven)
Makaya McCraven Sees the Future of Jazz Through Layers of History (New York Times article by Giovanni Russonello)
Roots of Broken Beat (a chronological playlist by yours truly)
Great, incisive commentary. And I loved this . . .
McCraven even layered in a voice sample over a quiet part of their performance: the same recording of the author Studs Terkel (“I never want to be known as anyone opposed to progress…”) that he mixed into the studio recording of the song “In These Times.”
Did you take that photo at the top of this post???