feature photo: Itzi Marques
Makaya McCraven is one of a handful of jazz artists today who is truly an original. He’s completely mastered of art of making sampling a form of advanced improvisation (i.e., ‘live sampling’), much as musicians had figured out how to make organic instruments like horns, piano, drums, etc., into tools of improvisation more than 100 years ago. In doing so, he offered something monumental: jazz that’s pure in the spirit of jazz that also appeals to the hip-hop listening sensibilities of generations who like McCraven was raised on that music from the 90s onwards. In doing so, he demonstrated the both jazz and hip-hop are really on the same continuum of Black American Music.
In The Moment (2015) was that breakthrough album where he worked live material like a mad scientist to create high art on the go, and he even had the audacity to figuratively bring listeners into the laboratory, making them feel present and participant at the birth of meaningful music. Since then, McCraven has done nothing but build on that original vision, whether it’s using a widening array of musicians or tossing in the formality of strings and horns into the chaos of music made with whimsy.
2025 brought another twist but not another album, per se. Instead, McCraven put out four EPs. Hidden Out!, PopUp Shop, Techno Logic and The People’s Mixtape (International Anthem Recording Co.). All of these are compiled into the long player Off the Record.
The idea of making a bundle of EPs averaging less than eighteen minutes each conforms to McCraven’s way of crafting art. Each EP are culled from live performance stretching nearly ten years from 2015 to 2025 but are grouped so that each EP possesses its own vibe.
Hidden Out is harvested from a couple of September, 2017 club dates at The Hideout in Chicago with only duo or trio performances where McCraven leads from the drum kit and finishes out in the studio with gobs of other instruments over a number of years afterwards. “Battleships” features the unmistakable dry guitar of Jeff Parker, which oddly meshes with the Junius Paul (bass)/McCraven (drums, percussion, synths) hard-pumping groove. “Away” is bathed in aqueous, 70s analog-y soul, while “Dark Parks” makes funk with Paul’s standup bass and “Awaze” sends Middle Eastern sensations. On “News Feed” the acoustic bass is funky but also dense and snaps together with McCraven’s sophisticated calypso rhythm.
McCraven molded PopUp Shop from 2015 gigs in L.A> into one, continuous, evolving groove. Again with Parker in guitar, Benjamin J. Shepherd mans bass guitar and Justefan is on vibes. Parker wraps it up on “Sweet Stuff” with jazzy but sharp-edged lines.
Techno Logic is much as the name implies, a more programmed, electronic kind of music, but even within this music style that’s generally thought of as rigid, creativity abounds. For one, the tuba from Theon Cross is employed as the ‘bass’ instrument. McCraven’s improvisational tendencies eventually pushes its way to the fore, culminating in Ben LeMar Gay’s cornet-led freakout on “Prime,” while “Strikes Again” is a single-chord vamp that Cross’s electronically-drenched trombone dances upon as Gay supplies a Delta-blues drone via a diddley bow.
The tracks from The People’s Mixtape were sourced from tenth anniversary performance of In The Moment, even bringing back bassist Junius Paul and trumpet player Marquis Hill from those older sessions to re-create the magic … along with vibraphonist Joel Ross. Hill’s effects-laden horn chopping it on during “The Beat Up” is a great moment.
The Off the Record collection is, in a sense, a return back to the pioneering methods of In The Moment. However, by breaking it up into four EPs afforded Makaya McCraven the opportunity to construct discreet ‘suites’ whereby he uses his studio sorcery to provide the connective tissue between these primal jams.
Off the Record and its component EPs are currently available for sale from Bandcamp.
*** Makaya McCraven CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
- Peter Somuah – ‘Walking Distance’ (2026) - March 13, 2026
- Soft Machine – ‘Thirteen’ (2026) - March 4, 2026
- Devin Gray – ‘Hz Of Gold‘ (2026) - March 2, 2026
