Makaya McCraven is a prolific drummer, composer, and producer. Aptly called a “cultural synthesizer,” he has a unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders, and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st century folk music. Profiled in Vice, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and NPR, among others, he and the music he makes today are at the very vanguard of progressive music. According to the New York Times, “McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.”

McCraven was raised in a vibrant, creative community in the Northampton, Massachusetts area, where his father often played with artists like saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Marion Brown, multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, and saxophonist Archie Shepp. That scene, with its enticing blend of cultures, helped establish his philosophy around jazz as folk music. Meanwhile, he was also a child of the nineties, deeply influenced by sample-based hip-hop. Eventually, he discovered bridges between the two. He co-founded a jazz-hip hop band and began to devote energy to “reappropriat(ing) this music to be what it is, what it means to me, and what it means for my people.”

When he and his partner moved to Chicago in 2006, McCraven soon found himself immersed in both the creative and straight-ahead jazz scenes. Within five years’ time, he’d established a name for himself, gigging alongside scene stalwarts like Willie Pickens, Marquis Hill, and Jeff Parker. He connected with the founders of Chicago’s International Anthem label in 2011, and in the years to follow, they hosted and recorded a series of improvised jazz nights featuring McCraven’s combo. These recordings seeded his 2015 double LP release In the Moment, which JazzTimes called “one of the year's most mesmerizing releases,” BBC radio’s Gilles Peterson named “Album of the Week,” and PopMatters, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times included on their Best of 2015 lists. 

He followed with releases in 2017 and 2018—and, in 2019, he mounted a multimedia performance of an early iteration of what would eventually become his 2022 album In These Times, which Grammy.com would call “McCraven’s most ambitious set of music.” In the meantime, he also remixed Gil Scott-Heron’s final album (2010’s I’m New Here) for 2020’s We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, issued Universal Beings E+F Sides (also in 2020), and delved into the venerable Blue Note Records catalog in 2021 for Deciphering the Message.  

According to Passion of the Weiss, “McCraven’s work, both with younger players and the sounds of older recordings, is part of a necessary conversation about the next evolution of the Black improvised music known colloquially as ‘jazz.’”