Makaya McCraven

“Over the last five or six years, drummer Makaya McCraven has migrated from the enlightened margins of the modern-jazz mainstream to someplace near its pulsing center, while earning the sort of outside acclaim reserved for the hippest forms of crossover.” – WBGO

Prolific drummer, composer, producer, and “beat scientist” Makaya McCraven has been aptly referred to as a cultural synthesizer. He has a unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders, and blending past, present, and future into arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted, 21st century folk music. Profiled in Vice, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and NPR among others, he and the music he makes today are at the very vanguard of the phenomenon that is jazz. After cutting his teeth in the Western Massachusetts music, McCraven soon found himself immersed in both the creative and straight-ahead jazz scenes of Chicago. Within five years, he’d established a name for himself, gigging alongside scene stalwarts like Willie Pickens, Marquis Hill and Jeff Parker. His 2015 LP release In The Moment was hailed by JazzTimes as “one of the year’s most mesmerizing releases.” McCraven continued to hone his process of live improvisation and sampling with Highly Rare (2017), Where We Come From (2018), Universal Beings (2018), Deciphering the Message (2021), and In These Times (2022). Last appearing at TD JazzFest 2019, he will be releasing a percussion-forward studio album this June, just in time for his return to the festival! Junius Paul bass, Joel Ross vibraphone, Josh Johnson saxophone