Makaya McCraven

LAST ALBUM (2022) IN THESE TIMES
NEW ALBUM IN 2025

Makaya McCraven was raised in Massachusetts and is now a prolific jazz drummer, composer, and producer based in Chicago. As an artist, he has been called a “cultural synthesizer” for his unique ability to blend the past, present, and future into polytextural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st-century folk music. He has been profiled in National Public Radio (NPR), Vice, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, among other prestigious publications. To quote The New York Times, “McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.”

McCraven’s innovative compositional method uses the studio as an instrument. He selects elements or “moments” from improvisational vignettes recorded with a live band. He then finds formal structure by stitching together these excerpts of theme and melody in production. McCraven calls his process “finding organization out of chaos.” Once Makaya has arranged the compositions in the studio, they are brought to life through live performances with his band.

When interviewed in 2019 for NPR’s Jazz Night in America, McCraven positioned his work within the larger conversation around the definition of contemporary jazz, “I don’t think what I’m doing is necessarily that far off from the legacy of jazz that I grew up in. I think one of the things that gives it strength is that people want to argue over it. That’s a good sign. That means there’s life here.”

In These Times is Makaya McCraven’s latest album. Released in September 2022, it is “a collection of poly-temporal compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as [his] personal experience as a product of a multinational, working-class musician community.”

In 2023, Makaya McCraven visited South Africa for the first time during a world tour with members of his Chicago-based group,  o support his latest album In These Times.

During recording sessions at Dyertribe Studios, McCraven and his bandmates met and played with some of South Africa’s most adventurous jazz musicians, including pianist Thandi Ntuli, percussionist Gontse Makhene, bassist Dalisu Ndlazi, trombonist/vocalist Siya Makuzeni, and saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane. These sessions comprise the raw, improvisational material from which Makaya will compose his next major album.

McCraven describes performing in South Africa as part of a larger project dating back to his 2018 album Universal Beings through which he sought to challenge the notion that the future of jazz and progressive music exists only in a handful of coastal American cities. 

Continuing in this trajectory, McCraven seeks to decentralize the conversation by visiting other great musicians and interacting within vibrant jazz communities worldwide. Through this, he facilitates a cultural exchange to find where “his voice fits into these different spaces. He intends to be an additive force that highlights the community of South African musicians and manifests a significant artistic contribution to a global conversation spoken through music.