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akaya McCraven is an innovator steeped in the tra
dition of jazz who sees evolution as part of that tradition. On his debut album, In the Moment, he pioneered a technique of music making that draws from the production values of Hip-Hop and fuses it with live jazz, samples, and beats. It’s a sonic fabric woven from all the disparate threads of Afro American music. He’s celebrated past masters on his Blue Note tribute, Deciphering the Message and soared creative heights on his masterpiece, In These Times. Totally Dublin caught up with him ahead of his eagerly anticipated NCH appearance on May 7th. Your father Stephen McCraven is himself a renowned drummer who has played with Yusef Lateef, Freddie Hubbard and most notably Archie Shepp. What impact did this upbringing and environment have on your own artistic development? A lot. I mean, it really sparked my love of music early on. It was a great opportunity to see that world and to play and jam with some people at a young age. There was an extended musical family, where a lot of different cats would be popping in and out at home for jam sessions, and people like Archie Shepp who taught me about the oral tradition of this music. While still in high school you formed your first band Cold Duck Complex, named after the famous Eddie Harris tune “Cold Duck Time”. It was a band that fused socially conscious hip hop with jazz in songs like “Wake Up” whose lyrics, “We want peace, but only when peace turns a profit”, are perhaps even more relevant today than when they were written. Yeah, we entered a battle of the bands and we won, and we started to play shows all over Western Massachusetts, and we ended up with a rapper from our high school. We opened for all kinds of hip-hop acts like The Pharcyde, Digable Planets, and The WuTang Clan... Do you see your music as being as socially and politically engaged now as it was then? Absolutely, I’m not a lyricist, but I am speaking with music, action and intent. I think this music, Black Music, Jazz, R&B, and hiphop, and all indigenous folk music, speaks to our hearts in a certain way. Miles Davis once said in an interview that instead of calling it 42 AND THE BEAT GOES ON jazz, he liked to call it “social music”, and I really like that way of thinking about it. It’s music that is steeped in tradition, but that’s also engaging with and responding to what’s happening at this time. In 2006 you moved to Chicago, immersing yourself in the scene there, playing alongside local stalwarts Marquis Hill and Jeff Parker, and ultimately signing up with the International Anthem label. When I moved to Chicago I really hit the ground running and got to play with so many great players, people like Corey Wilkes and Ernest Dawkins, and in so many different scenes. It’s such a rich environment there and very open to all kinds of experimentation. It wasn’t just jazz, there were bands like Wilco too, and I remember cats like Chance the Rapper when they were still in high school. I was coming in as this young guy Jazz drummer Makaya McCraven is bringing Jazz into new territory. WORDS Billy O’Hanluain PHOTO Itzy Marques trying to play with as many different cats as I could, while building my own studio and working on my own projects. In the Moment, your debut album, was the first International Anthem release that I heard, and it was the second ever release on the label. It’s an album that very much sign posts the past, present, and future of music, with its use of live, sampled, and remixed music, all woven together into an organic whole. Could you tell us how it came about? I see the album as part of the tradition of artists trying out new things with technology, and utilizing the studio to see what’s possible. For me as an emerging artist, I was really interested in how hip-hop was being made, and how different producers like Madlib and J Dilla were using samplers and the studio as another instrument. I wanted to make beats, so I hung out with DJs and producers. I started doing a series of weekly gigs with Marquis Hill, Jeff Parker, Matt Ulery and other cats in a basement room that used to be a bank vault. It was an intimate lounge room with a few tables and couches, and a small audience. We started documenting all the performances. I brought the recordings home and began manipulating them in the studio. It happened kind of naturally, and I said, “Wow, this is cool!” And, we found a great partnership with