- Drum & bass, jazz and hip-hop collide on an LP of beautiful compositions that highlight the non-stop evolution of Black music.
- Makaya McCraven, a drummer, producer and bandleader, creates eclectic, jazz-leaning compositions that capture the mood of the moment. In the '60s, Nina Simone made the case that it is an artist's duty to reflect the times, and this has always been true of McCraven's career, with a discography that outlines how Black music remains non-stop in its constant evolution. The Paris born, Western Massachusetts-raised artist is known by the odd and occasionally bizarre pseudonyms "beat scientist" or "cultural synthesizer" for his technique of digitally chopping up recordings of his bands' jam sessions into hip-hop breakbeats.
However, if you want to classify what has been described as jazz—a term most jazz musicians of a certain era detest—McCraven's music is actually the blues in continuation, whether the drum hits are coming from behind a kit or from a digital workstation. In an April 2020 podcast interview with Joe Wong of The Trap Set, McCraven revealed that he began his training with his father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, starting when he was five years old. He continued his education in middle school by forming a band with friends. They would back-up his mother, the Hungarian singer Agnes Zsigmondi, performing Jewish folk songs. His high school band, the jazz hip-hop outfit Cold Duck Complex, gained popularity in the American Northeast by supporting artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Mixmaster Mike, which began his affinity for performing odd time signatures and stretching the definition of what jazz could be.
Never a fan of mimicry or inflexible constructs McCraven said, "I would be more interested in what my elders thought, than what they played." In comparison to the rest of his discography, McCraven's gorgeously varied and charming In These Times seems like less of an anomaly and more of an answer that reveals what we've been witnessing over the past decade: jazz remains bulletproof. As opposed to earlier efforts—mixtapes, EPs, and albums—that worked better as skeletal etchings, the strength of In These Times is in its considered arrangements. The melodies take center stage rather than solely the kinetic rhythmic attack McCraven can unleash whenever he pleases. And when he pleases, his percussion charts can hit with a ferocity that shudders like drum licks plucked from a lengthy Fela-meets James-Brown after-hours live session.
In These Times took more than seven years to complete and was recorded in five different studios and four live performance spaces. With a title that opens up to multiple interpretation, it's an 11-song modern epic that pirouettes like Misty Copeland and can chug along with the pre-linguistic ideas found in a DJ Spooky set. Its 41 minutes frame the value of group expression while offering running theories about the direction Black music will take in the future. Fusing classical and symphonic awareness, here, the blues are forever swinging, either by harmonic grace or within the framework of instrumental hip-hop.
The LP is a celebration and prayer on this glorious yet challenging life, and here we see jazz evolving "humbly" (to borrow a phrase from Dâm-Funk). Dig the title track, which uses a sample of Harry Belafonte discussing the allegorical African-American figure John Henry, instilling that "elbow grease" work ethic meant to dig our own selves out. "Dream Another" gets baptized in the dreamscape harp-playing of Brandee Younger (with a cosmic jazz feel that channels Dorothy Ashby's sound) and the ethereal flute-work of De
Sean Jones. It's a stunner of a song—think Trouble Man-era Marvin Gaye crossed with a Curtis Mayfield score—a divine instrumental piece that hits lovingly and deep like mahogany in the fall.
These cross-stitched instances of genre fluidity serve as the project's main thread. The ethereal beginning of "This Place That Place" erupts into LTJ Bukem astral-jazz territory, with a sublime atmospheric drum & bass arrangement. Or consider "Seventh String" where Jones once more uses his flute to lift us heavenwards, swirling up in autumn leaf entanglement, a wind dance that can't seem to stop. The contrast of strings moves quickly against the rigid and bombastic polyrhythms hints at the travails of being alive, In These Times.
Tracklist01. In These Times
02. The Fours
03. High Fives
04. Dream Another
05. Lullaby
06. This Place That Place
07. The Calling
08. Seventh String
09. So Ubuji
10. The Knew Untitled
11. The Title