Universal Beings

For a jazz drummer, Makaya McCraven has a rather unorthodox way of making albums. Back in 2014, he began hosting a live-improv series with other like-minded Chicago musicians. “We recorded everything, and I started to just mess with it as samples,” McCraven tells Apple Music. He would pluck out the best parts from those extended jams and, with digital editing software, build entirely new tracks. The result—2015’s aptly titled *In the Moment*—introduced a style of hip-hop-inspired production that owes as much to Madlib as it does Sun Ra. But it still comes down to that source material. “It’s always about playing with lots of people, in lots of situations, and exploring as many avenues as I can to push me to grow as an artist,” he says. Culled from what he calls “spontaneous compositions”—recorded live with different ensembles in four cities, then recomposed digitally—*Universal Beings*, McCraven\'s third official album, is both a testament to his creative ambitions and a pulse-taking of modern jazz. British tenor heavyweight Shabaka Hutchings, who appears on the Chicago sessions, plays with rhythmic ferocity, while fellow London saxophonist Nubya Garcia offers laidback counterpoint to Ashley Henry’s moody Rhodes piano. \"I think they’re coming from more of a groove sensibility,” McCraven says of his London collaborators, some of whom he met literally moments before they took the stage together for these recordings. “A lot of them are tapping into the diverse fabric of the city, with music from the West Indies, Afrobeat, British soul.” With abundant harp from Brandee Younger and cello from Tomeka Reid, the tracks from New York only hint at conventional jazz idioms, instead leaning more heavily on abstract elements of classical, rock, and R&B. And on the songs made from the LA session at guitarist Jeff Parker’s house, energetic free-jazz flourishes mix with gloriously off-kilter drums and the musicians themselves ruminating on consciousness, happiness, and human potential. When McCraven tells Apple Music, “The music exists in an alternate universe, an alternate reality,” it’s just as much a comment on the album’s sample-based structure as its overarching philosophy.

Paris-born, New England-raised, long-time Chicago-residing Makaya McCraven has been at the forefront of genre-redefining movements in jazz since 2015, when he introduced the world to his unique brand of ‘organic beat music’ on the breakout album In The Moment. Culled, cut, post-produced & re-composed by Makaya using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, through incubation & experimentation In The Moment established a procedural blueprint that he has since been sharpening & developing. Honing this process on narrower sets of source material, Makaya followed up In The Moment with 2 mixtape releases – 2017’s Highly Rare, a lo-fi free-jazz-meets-hip-hop suite he made from a live 4-track recording, and June 2018’s Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), which he produced using live recordings from London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre (captured at a showcase called CHICAGOxLONDON). Now, after 4+ years of refining his approach, Makaya McCraven puts forth an ambitious new work – Universal Beings – a culmination of concepts conceived by In The Moment, and his most elegant & articulated work yet. Spurred by a desire to connect with old friends & new collaborators in places where similar spirits & diasporic jazz innovations are thriving, Makaya worked with International Anthem across late 2017 & early 2018 to setup intimate live sessions in New York & Chicago, and pop-up “studio” sessions in London & Los Angeles. Though the contexts and logistics were D.I.Y. (as they almost always are with IARC), the friends & friends-of-friends that Makaya was able to enlist are top tier players across the board. Some might call them super groups of “new” jazz musicians from their respective cities, with Makaya as a common denominator. But more importantly, collectively they make an inspiring display of the organic global inter-connectedness of the Black American music tradition in 2018. Physically spanning national & international borders to create an album that musically spans deep spiritual jazz meditations, pulsing post-bop grooves & straight-ahead boom-bap, Makaya McCraven defies the simplifications of revisionism & regionalism while celebrating the sounds, settings & stories that define the provenance of his work. Universal Beings projects an all-encompassing message of unity, peace & power by embracing transcendence in all its expressions.

The jazz drummer and producer’s hypnotic double album is culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes that he’s layered and spliced together into something wholly new and radically communal.

Guiding the undulating, polyrhythmic, genre-ambiguous flow of drummer Makaya McCraven's ever-evolving "organic beat music," is a strategy not far removed from the one employed by Teo Macero and Miles Davis on Bitches Brew and subsequent dates: Here, moments from continuous improvised performances are digitally looped, cut, spliced, and edited into entirely new compositions.

The infectious energy and bombastic grooves of jazz/soul drummer/band leader Makaya McCraven are channelled into the most focused and cohesi...