Makaya McCraven sits behind a drum kit. His musicians play. He records everything.
Then he goes home and cuts it apart.
The improvised sessions — live recordings from clubs, studios, living rooms — become raw material for an editing process that splices, loops, rearranges, and restructures the spontaneous performances. What emerged from the room in real time becomes something that did not exist in those moments. According to jazz historian Ted Gioia, the musicians contributed the sounds. McCraven contributed the form.
This is not a new idea in music. Hip-hop producers have worked this way since the 1970s. Dub engineers in Jamaica worked this way before that. What McCraven has done is apply the logic of the producer to the logic of the jazz improviser. The result is music that sits at the intersection of both traditions without belonging fully to either.
How Did McCraven Develop This Approach?
McCraven was born in Paris to a jazz drummer father and a Hungarian folk singer mother. He grew up in Massachusetts, moved to Chicago in his twenties, and began building a reputation in the city’s jazz scene in the early 2010s through relentless gigging and an almost obsessive attention to rhythm.
The Early Years in Chicago
The Chicago scene in those years was leaning hard into the free improvisation side of things. McCraven played with the expected players, but he was paying closer attention to something different: how rhythm sections communicate when there’s no safety net of a song structure. How a drummer and bass player can find a groove that doesn’t rely on a preset tempo. His breakthrough came not from a conventional album but from a method.
In the Moment and the Mixtape Model
He began recording his own live sets and turning them into mixtapes. In the Moment (2015, International Anthem) documented this process publicly for the first time — a set of recordings from a weekly residency at Haagen’s in Chicago, edited and shaped into an album that felt more composed than the documentation of an improvisation. The individual sets had disappeared. What remained was something McCraven had constructed.
The jazz world noticed. The hip-hop world noticed. The overlap between them had been growing for years — Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins, Terrace Martin — but McCraven’s approach was distinctive because he was working primarily as a drummer and producer, not as a melodic instrumentalist. The rhythm was the argument.
What Can Be Learned From Universal Beings?
Universal Beings (2018, International Anthem) made the method explicit and demonstrated its potential at the largest scale. McCraven organized four recording sessions in four cities — New York, Chicago, London, Los Angeles — each with a different set of musicians who reflected the jazz scenes of those places. He then edited the results into a double album that served multiple purposes simultaneously.
The Architecture of Four Cities
The sessions were not collaborative in the traditional sense. No musician knew what McCraven would do with their playing. They recorded for a few hours, played in the way that musicians do, and left. The architecture came later, in the edit.
The New York side features Brandee Younger on harp, Joel Ross on vibraphone, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Dezron Douglas on bass alongside McCraven’s drums. It sounds like a group finding its language in real time, which it was — and it also sounds like something McCraven arranged, which he did. The London side features Nubya Garcia on tenor saxophone, Ashley Henry on Rhodes piano, and Daniel Casimir on bass. The Chicago side brings in Shabaka Hutchings. The Los Angeles side includes Jeff Parker.
How McCraven Shapes Narrative Across Sessions
By the time the four sessions are assembled and edited, the album has a coherence that no single session produced. McCraven found it in the tape. He identified the moments where energy shifted, where a tempo crystallized without discussion, where one musician’s idea caught fire in another’s playing. He used those moments like a filmmaker uses footage.
| Session | Location | Key Musicians | Notable Texture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side A | New York | Younger, Ross, Reid, Douglas | Harp and vibraphone interplay |
| Side B | London | Garcia, Henry, Casimir | Saxophone-Rhodes conversation |
| Side C | Chicago | Hutchings, McCraven | Polyrhythmic intensity |
| Side D | Los Angeles | Parker, McCraven | Spacious guitar counterpoint |
How Does the Editing Process Function as Composition?
What McCraven does in the editing process is make compositional decisions that the musicians could not have made in the room. He identifies the phrases that ended perfectly. He finds the transitions between soloists that created an unexpected texture. He locates the section where the drummer and bassist locked in before the rest of the group caught up. He builds the record’s architecture from those moments.
The edit is where McCraven composes. The session is where he gathers material.
The Reversal of Documentation
This reversal of the conventional jazz recording process has produced music that critics have struggled to categorize, which is part of why it has attracted attention. It is improvised in its origins and composed in its presentation. It has the feeling of spontaneity and the structure of something planned. It documents real-time musical decisions and then rearranges those decisions into a sequence that nobody made in real time.
He is not making a document of what happened in the room. He is using what happened in the room to make something that couldn’t have happened anywhere. The musicians’ improvisation becomes the material. The editing becomes the composition.
Why This Matters for Recording and Performance
The implications ripple outward. If you are McCraven, you are not trying to capture a performance. You are not trying to preserve a moment. You are mining that moment for usable material. This shifts the entire nature of what a recording session is. The musicians do not know what will be kept. They do not know what will be cut. They do not know what will be looped or reversed or placed next to something they never heard.
What Position Does McCraven Occupy in Contemporary Jazz?
McCraven is not the first jazz musician to engage seriously with studio production as a compositional act. Miles Davis and Teo Macero were doing something similar on Bitches Brew in 1969. Herbie Hancock approached the studio as an instrument. Robert Glasper has been moving in this direction for years. But the hip-hop production context McCraven brings to it is different, and the result is music that appeals to audiences who would not have come to jazz through any other door.
His In These Times (2022, International Anthem), which was in development for seven years, is arguably the most ambitious version of the method yet. It is a record that sounds simultaneously like it was improvised yesterday and composed decades ago. It has the spaciousness of modal jazz. It has the rhythmic weight of hip-hop. It has the structural patience of something that was built rather than played.
The Expanding Audience for McCraven’s Work
One measure of McCraven’s impact is the audiences he reaches. The hip-hop audience finds something in his records that feels closer to home than traditional jazz can be. The jazz audience finds something experimental and forward-looking. These two audiences rarely exist in the same room, but McCraven’s records exist in both places. That’s not because he compromised between them. It’s because he found a place where the logic of both traditions actually converges.
What Comes After the Collage Method
Album by album, McCraven is staking out a new position for the jazz musician: not just performer, not just composer, but the person who finds the music in the material that other musicians made. This is fundamentally different from previous production-based approaches in jazz. The producer in the past often served the composer or bandleader. McCraven is the composer, the bandleader, and something closer to a filmmaker all at once.
The question that lingers is whether his approach will influence the next generation of jazz musicians working with recorded material. Or whether McCraven will remain the singular figure who figured out how to make editing sound like jazz. Either way, he has already changed what the recording studio can be for a jazz musician. The studio is not a documentation tool. The studio is where the real improvisation happens.
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