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MAKAYA McCRAVEN QUINTET
Paris 2020 [no label, 1CD]
New Morning, Paris, France; January 15, 2020. Very good FM broadcast.
Natalie Weiner, rollingstone.com:
“‘Is jazz dead?’ is a stupid question,” says drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven over beers at a Lower East Side bar that is, fittingly, playing a selection of 1930s and ’40s-era jazz cuts. “If you have to ask the same question for 50 years, it becomes a rhetorical question. When did it die?”
Those who know McCraven’s work would likely reach a similar conclusion. Critically acclaimed releases like In the Moment (2015) and Highly Rare (2017) - both made up entirely of live material - put the heat and vitality of an intimate jazz club into a distinctly 21st century mode of brainy beat music, edited down to their searching, abstract highlights.
They gave McCraven the kind of jazz-vanguard cred also recently assigned to artists like Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, all of whom have earned some degree of crossover success over the past decade thanks in part to their ability to tap into hip-hop and R&B audiences. Despite the fact that these artists emerged at different times and with different aesthetics, each has been presented as the face of a jazz “revival” or “resurgence” - a necessary spark to an otherwise moribund genre. But McCraven, 35, would prefer that listeners don’t call it a comeback.
“It’s like, gag me,” he says of the idea that jazz needs saving. Part of the inspiration behind his latest album, Universal Beings (out October 26, 2018 on International Anthem) was the music’s current vitality. McCraven recorded the project with four different ensembles, in four different cities: New York, Los Angeles, London and Chicago, his adopted hometown.
“It’s not ‘West Coast Is the Best Coast,’ not ‘London Is the Face of Jazz To Come,’ not ‘New York Is the Only Place Jazz Lives in America,’” he says, listing imagined trend-piece headlines that aren’t too far off from the real thing. “The story for me is that each of these places have really cool local scenes that cultivate their own sound and their own thing - yet we’re part of a global music movement that’s getting a lot of traction right now, and that’s super exciting. I wanted to shine a light on that. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to get a bunch of cool people on your record.”
In many ways, global jazz culture is the story of McCraven’s life. His father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven - a Connecticut native who was mentored by avant-gardists Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef and Sam Rivers - and his mother, Hungarian folk singer Ágnes Zsigmondi, met in Paris, where McCraven was born.
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Thanks to elgaucho for sharing the show at Dime.
Lineage:
TSF (FM) / Pioneer F91 / Edirol RH-09R / Audacity / XAct / Flac
Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (320 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.
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Track 01. In These Times 19:25
Track 02. Atlantic Black * 13:24
Track 03. Black Lion * 6:06
Track 04. I’m New Here/Untitled 11:35
Track 05. Three Fifths a Man 7:04
Track 06. Untitled 4:54
63 mins
* Tracks from Universal Beings.
Lineup:
Makaya McCraven - drums
Marquis Hill - trumpet
Irvin Pierce - tenor saxophone
Joel Ross - vibraphone
Junius Paul - bass, vocals
Click here to order Makaya McCraven releases.