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 into something that did not exist in the room when it was being played. 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 — and the result is music that sits at the intersection of both traditions without belonging fully to either.

Where He Came From

McCraven was born in Paris to a jazz drummer father and a Hungarian folk singer mother. He grew up in Massachusetts, moved to Chicago, 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.

His breakthrough came not from a conventional album but from a process: he began recording his own live sets and turning them into mixtapes. In the Moment (2015, International Anthem) documented this method publicly for the first time — a set of recordings from a weekly residency, edited and shaped into an album that felt more composed than the documentation of an improvisation.

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.

Universal Beings

Universal Beings (2018, International Anthem) made the method explicit. 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 is simultaneously a travelogue, a portrait of a musical moment, and a demonstration of what his editing can do.

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.

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.

The Edit Is the 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 moments — the phrase that ended perfectly, the transition between soloists that created an unexpected texture, the section where the drummer and bassist locked in before the rest of the group caught up — and builds the record’s architecture from those moments.

The edit is where McCraven composes. The session is where he gathers material.

This reversal of the conventional jazz recording process has produced music that critics have struggled to categorise, 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.

What It Means for Jazz

McCraven is not the first jazz musician to engage seriously with studio production as a compositional act — Miles Ahead Davis and Teo Macero were doing something similar on Bitches Brew in 1969. 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 the most ambitious version of the method yet — a record that sounds simultaneously like it was improvised yesterday and composed decades ago. It has the spaciousness of modal jazz and the rhythmic weight of hip-hop and the structural patience of something that was built rather than played.

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.