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of the deeper cuts from their vaults like Hank Mo
bley’s A Slice of the Top along with tunes by lesser known artists like Elmo Hope. You strike me as a kind of audio-archaeologist excavating a lot of older music and re-presenting it in a brilliantly contemporary way. Is there a new audience discovering jazz through hip-hop? When I was coming up, being a jazz musician was kind of uncool, that was the vibe, and when I was playing in a lot of jazz clubs with a lot of different artists, they weren’t places where I was meeting cats my own age, but when I started going in to the Beats scene and meeting producers, I was checking them out, and they were like, “Wow, you play real drums!” And then I realized that some of the DJs were actually bigger music heads and bigger jazz fans than people in the jazz clubs. They often knew more about the records and the personnel than the club cats did, and so I found a whole new group of people who were really interested in jazz. I’ve met quite a few younger record collectors, people in their late twenties, who’ve discovered Blue Note records and the music of Lee Morgan and Art Blakey through listening to Deciphering the Message. It’s very exciting to think of that classic music finding a new audience through such a contemporary medium... Well, I think it’s important to celebrate the past and all the things that have set the bar, they are an example for us as we keep on moving towards the future, and building on what came before. We are not going to do the same thing, but we are standing on the shoulders of the past, and innovation is a part of the tradition. It’s a challenging thing in an ever-changing world to hold on to our roots and our music. the International Anthem who said, “Do this!” They hadn’t even put out a record yet, so, it was the inception of their thing too. Your method is reminiscent of how Miles Davis worked with his producer Teo Macero, where musicians were invited to play in the studios and follow Miles’s, often cryptic, instructions. The recordings were later spliced together to produce such seminal works as Bitches Brew and One the Corner. Do you see yourself as part of that lineage? There’s definitely a relationship there, maybe not exactly with that method, but sure it’s been a huge influence and my work has been compared to it, and I am doing something kind of similar but different. Are you bringing hip-hop into jazz or jazz into hip hop? Is your current work a fusion of both? To me it’s not even like hip-hop per se, hip-hop inspired my interest in production and innovation, in technology, and new spaces in music, all of that connects with my love of being in the studio and recording, and this is the path that has been developing for me. On your album Deciphering the Message you were given full access to the Blue Note catalogue to remix and reimagine some In These Times your 2022 album was released just as we were emerging from the worst of the pandemic. It was, for me, like a sonic hug after the isolation, it seemed to soar after all the confinement, and it flooded me with a real sense of hope. It is like your ‘Revolver moment’ where you lay out your stall and display all the styles, classical, jazz, ambient, and beats that you have woven into one seamless whole... I’m grateful for that, I definitely wanted to make something beautiful, by that I mean something uplifting, they were very dark times. Was there a double entendre in the album title, referring to both the political times, and the multiple time signatures in the music itself? Yeah, absolutely. Do you record all your concerts, in the sense of you collecting fresh material for you to later manipulate in the studio? No, not exactly, I tour often and play the music from my records, and we use that as a vehicle for improvisation, but when I am recording for new material, I often do special intimate concerts that are completely improvised, in smaller, acoustic venues. So, what can we expect to hear when you play the NCH in May? Most likely we’re going to be playing from the repertoire from our latest album Off The Record, and stuff from In These Times and In the Moment, there’ll be improvised jams too. Right now there’s so much that’s fake and false, and you can’t tell what’s real, but when we’re together in a real space with people in numbers, it’s really powerful, it’s transcendent. And something I do in the show is to go into complete silence, it’s really meaningful when we’re all gathered together. Makaya McCraven plays The National Concert Hall on May 7th. PERSPECTIVES The National Concert Hall’s Perspectives series sees many of the leading lights in contemporary music explore the musical present in a series of unique concert experiences. Boundaries between genres are beautifully blurred in this daringly curated series. Steve Reich’s 90th birthday will be celebrated by the Kronos Quartet in a concert focusing on quartets commissioned by Kronos including the seminal Different Trains. An all-star line-up of contemporary jazz masters including Joe Lovano and Jeff “Tain” Watts will pay homage to the staggering legacy of John Coltrane, in a programme of modern interpretations of his work plus originals inspired by his spirit and music. The ever probing and experimental hardanger d’amore-fiddle player Caoimhin O Raghallaigh meets fellow sonic navigators Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke for an intimate gig at The Studio. Composer and Guitarist Mary Halvorson will play music from her new album About Ghosts, and as if not spoiled for choice already, American band leader, drummer, and beat maker, Makaya McCraven will be on the main stage playing music from his seminal albums In the Moment, In these Times and his latest release, Off the Record. See www.nch.ie for further details 43