Makaya McCraven

Shows

Makaya McCraven is a musician of the forty-something generation, a drummer, composer, and, more generally, a music maker who perfectly represents the colorful current jazz scene coming out of Chicago. His family background and education are significant in their own right: born in Paris to American drummer Steve McCraven from Washington and Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, he grew up in Massachusetts before moving to Chicago in 2007. His idea of music reflects this constant traveling and much more: it combines jazz, not only avant-garde but also straight-ahead, as well as techno, hip hop, and the colorful London scene that loves to work on sound in post-production. If we want to try to understand where one of the paths of today's jazz is leading, this is an excellent opportunity.

BIOGRAPHY

Makaya McCraven, who has been aptly called a “cultural synthesizer” and “beat scientist,”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 the New York Times, Vice, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and NPR, among other publications, Makaya and the music he makes today is what Passion of Weiss says “is part of a necessary conversation about the next evolution of the Black improvised music known colloquially as ‘jazz.’ He’s found the threads connecting the past with the present, and is either wrapping them with new colors and textures, or he’s plucking them gleefully like the strings of a grand instrument.”