In 2014, the Chicago-based progressive periodical magazine In These Times ran a series highlighting the 40th anniversary of Studs Terkel’s working-class oral history compendium Working, interviewing a dozen professionals from various backgrounds, including Makaya McCraven, who in conversation with the magazine’s contributing editor, Jeremy Gantz, articulated the realities of being a working jazz musician. As McCraven prepares to bring his new Walker-commissioned work—also titled In These Times—to Minneapolis October 18, Gantz reconnected with McCraven to explore the themes, styles, and cultural context of his Walker-commissioned musical suite, and to see how his life had changed, or perhaps more surprisingly, how the struggle had stayed the same.
Listen closely to Makaya McCraven’s remarkable string of recent albums and you can hear an argument for the intrinsic value of crossing borders, both literally and artistically. The song “Gnawa” on his breakout 2015 album In the Moment was an early tipoff—it’s a reference to a northwest African ethnic group whose polyrhythmic music has influenced the Chicago-based jazz drummer, bandleader, and producer. Born in Paris to an African-American drummer and a Hungarian singer and flutist, McCraven grew up in Massachusetts soaking up jazz, African, and Eastern European influences from his parents—and the idea of art as a means of sustenance.
“I grew up always having to eat off of music and the arts,” he says. “My parents have some different ideals that they still live out—the importance of the work that musicians do and how that is not all about money.”
With In the Moment, McCraven found his groove as a producer, debuting an approach that erases the usual border between the studio and live performances. He harvests recordings of improvisations performed in front of audiences for highlights, then splices, loops and adds effects to create wholly new songs. The production process is the composition, in a sense, and the seams never show.
During the last four years, he’s refined the approach while cross-pollinating with vital jazz scenes in different cities and countries—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London. His critically acclaimed album Universal Beings, released last year, stitched together pieces of recordings from those four cities into a cohesive and hypnotic whole, while also signaling McCraven had a few things on his mind. “We’re taught to think as individuals versus as collective people,” he says on the double album’s penultimate track, “Brighter Days Beginning,” which layers a conversation with friends over languid saxophone and guitar lines.
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
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Makaya McCraven and collaborators perform in the In These Times offices, September 15, 2019. Photo: David Schalliol/Scrappers Film Group
With In These Times, the project McCraven debuts at the Walker Art Center on October 18, social themes are present in a way we’ve never seen before in McCraven’s work—and rarely see in jazz music these days. The title, which is also the name of his next album (slated for a spring 2020 release), signals both McCraven’s contemporary societal concerns and the diversity of time signatures in the music: not just 4/4, but 7/8, 5/8, 11/8. (In These Times is also the name of the progressive political magazine I interviewed McCraven for in 2014 as part of a series commemorating the 40th anniversary of Studs Terkel’s classic book Working. In September, as a nod to how the magazine and new album intersect thematically, McCraven and his band held a recording session at In These Times’s Chicago office space in front of a small audience.)
Drawing on source material including a Hungarian folk song his mother used to sing to him as a child and vocal samples drawn from archived with prominent black musicians, writers and activists, McCraven’s latest work blends the personal and political. The Walker performance also blends the aural and visual; artist Kim Alpert will improvise a video collage of archival footage featuring black activists and musical innovators as McCraven and eight other musicians improvise. It’s the first time McCraven has taken such a multimedia approach before.
But his vision for In These Times, McCraven says, has been percolating for a while: bring together his own transnational musical influences while also exploring transnational challenges such as economic inequality and the struggles of artists. “How have the current economic structures drained the music industry and the artist?” he asks. “Where does the money go, where is the power?”
The new work also explores fundamental questions about the relationship between artists and social struggles, he says, and how working artists should relate to working people more generally. It’s a culminating moment for him. “The vision of this has been with me a long time, but it’s narrowed and narrowed down into something really cohesive,” he says. “I think it’s really pertinent in terms of conversations today about capitalism and socialism—the current political debate.”
Not that McCraven wants to make “political” music, in any partisan sense; to the contrary. He is trying to find a deeper purpose for his music that engages with the world in new ways. “Part of what I want to do is create some sense of universality through art. I’m throwing all these influences into a pot—they relate to my life and family, but also with what’s happening in the world today, the debates over borders and separation.”
There’s always been a communal quality to McCraven’s work—the ambient noises from performing venues, the small ensembles locked in improvised grooves, the connections to distinct jazz scenes in various cities. With In These Times, he’s collaborating with other artists to push himself into new aesthetic and thematic territory. Drawing on all influences and letting them mix freely into new and unpredictable things—it might just be a political act in a time when our own borders are weaponized, both literally and rhetorically.
“Music does lie in the roots of social movements,” he says. “Hopefully the music can bring people together and offer some sort of common place we can work together from.”
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