Rhythm is at the core of everything Makaya McCraven does. The eclectic Chicago jazz composer and producer is also a drummer, and he points to the invention of the drum kit as a turning point in popular music — one whose first ripples still cause waves in modern sounds. "Even electronic music today is still kick-snare-hat," he says.
Rhythm is also the driving force behind one of the longest-gestating projects he’s thrown himself into, In These Times, out Sept. 23 via International Anthem/Nonesuch/XL.
"This record has been kind of a long process, and when I was first really coming up with it, it revolved around a rhythmic concept, these odd meter and polyrhythms I was working on: ⅞, ⅝ and 11/8, and putting them into grooves and beats that would translate them a different way," he tells GRAMMY.com. "Through the process of making and composing the music and working it out as a live act, this is kind of representing what we play and where I’ve gone through this process and bringing it to a large scale ensemble, and orchestrating it for strings."
The seeds of his new album were first planted nearly a decade ago, when he began working on a series of compositions that used unusual meters and time signatures, exploring rhythm at its most unconventional. As the project slowly underwent a long and gradual evolution, growing more ambitious with time, McCraven took on a variety of other projects: recording and reconfiguring improvisations by jazz musicians in four different cities on Universal Beings, reimagining songs by Gil Scott-Heron on We’re New Again, and then delivering a remix album on Deciphering the Message. But in that time, the work on In These Times never stopped.
In These Times is one of McCraven’s most ambitious sets of music, which says a lot given the scope of some of his past projects. Each of its tracks incorporates the intricate time signatures that sparked the project’s inspiration — though there are a handful in a standard 4/4 for good measure — as well as a number of elaborate string arrangements. It also finds McCraven back in the company of some of his prior collaborators, including guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Junius Paul and trumpeter Marquis Hill.
The album is reflective of the socio-political moment, informed by the chaos and fear of the pandemic, and recent political upheaval and activism. In These Times shares its name with a long-running Chicago activist publication, and opens with a quote from the interview archive of legendary writer and historian Studs Terkel ("I never want to be known as anyone opposed to progress"). There isn’t one specific message that drives In These Times, but McCraven says that the intent is for some hope to shine through.
"Everyone's kind of fed up, everything’s a little edgier, and there’s a feeling that everything could change. But if we’re better to each other and have more hope, maybe things will get better, and we can be kinder to each other," he says. "You can think about all of the difficult things happening, but there’s also still a lot of beauty and a lot of incredible things to be hopeful for and keep pushing for."
GRAMMY.com spoke to McCraven via Zoom about the long period of crafting his new album, the unfinished nature of music and making a socio-political statement with instrumental music.
This interview has been edited for clarity
The genesis of In These Times goes back quite a few years. Did it end up being different than how you might have originally imagined it?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely different than what I conceived when I first started recording toward the beginning of the project.
I’ll often have a concept or maybe a process I want to work on, or a collaboration with a person or a separate group of people, but the outcome is yet to be determined, and I like to keep things open to different possibilities. I try not to give myself too much of a pre-script to what’s going to happen. It’s kind of like pulling back and letting it reveal itself to me. I tried a lot of different things, a lot of different ideas until it felt like this was the record.
You’re working with a larger ensemble, with lots of strings, and In These Times is lush, rich record. You could say it’s a jazz record, but there are elements of electronic music and other sounds as well. Was it your intent to bridge these musical spaces or to create something that exists in between them?
All of that, yeah. I do like to leave things open-ended and to ask the question of what we’re really talking about with genre, and where one genre ends and another begins, and do they have rules? Do we commodify music to be able to speak about it? We need the language to give us something to connect with and talk about, but these are abstract concepts to me. I’ve played so much music with so many different people in so many different bands that were already hard to define. And sometimes a band itself is the definition of a sound or a time period or a genre. Like Bob Marley. I know there’s a whole genre of reggae, but what he made was something more specific.
I try to learn and play as well as I can with people and learn different things and be able to hop into different things and be a student of different styles.. I might delve more into synthetic sound versus organic sound, or think about how heavy handed I want to be in production, or have more natural sound or more openness with the musicians. It’s definitely intentional, but the intent is never anything other than looking for as many compelling sounds, emotions and textures as I can figure out.
How much of an imprint on the music is left by your collaborators?
It’s different for different projects. The majority of the record are tunes of mine, like "In These Times" or "This Place That Place," or "The Knew Untitled." And then there’s "Something Like a Lullaby," which is a tune of my mother’s that I played and arranged for the record, and it pulls some of the string parts from vocal parts my mother did on her record.
Some pieces came together with a little more production, like maybe using strings that were arranged for another piece of music and then resampling them and using that as a new framework. With In the Moment or Universal Beings, that was much more collective, spontaneous composition. This record is a little more straightforward with the tunes, but I jumped back into those spaces as well.
"The Knew Untitled" has a number of different arrangements and feels that we’ve played it in…and that just comes from playing live and everyone bringing their vibe and contributing to the piece.
I like to learn the music as aurally as possible and teach people by ear, even if I’m giving to specific changes and parts, and it still gives space for everyone’s voice to shine through and shape where the tune goes over a long period, until the final moment where I say, "This is the version that’s gonna make the record." I’ll lean on the musicians a lot too, like "You think this is cool, man?"
With your compositions undergoing so much change over time, are there infinite possibilities to how they can take shape?
Yes, I think so. That’s natural to music. You can cover a tune, re-arrange a tune, and have new orchestrations. In the larger genre of jazz, you have jazz standards and can play and rearrange this version and that version. In modern jazz, we can re-harmonize this piece of music, or play a version that doesn’t have the bridge somehow, and that goes for all kinds of music.
On this record, there are moments from different nights of some of the tunes in different spaces. Where it’s like, OK, we’re in Symphony Center, the orchestra hall in Chicago, and then we’re in the studio, and then we were in the In These Times office downtown, or now we’re in Hawaii [at] the mobile studio where I did production work at my mother-in-law’s house. There are different moments, but one thing I like to do is capture the live recordings and then re-present them on record, not just as a live recording, but in snippets or with other production stuff. Someone might be soloing in one show over a band in another space.
I appreciate the double meaning of the title, the juxtaposition of the idea of time signatures with a reflection on the moment we’re living in. Was that intended as a commentary on something specific?
The album [was recorded during] the middle of the most intense change I think our world has ever seen, at least in my lifetime, due to the pandemic. And that definitely struck home as I was kind of getting into the final stages of pulling it all together. But before that, when I was working with the different time signatures, and I had [working titles] like Hard Times or Difficult Times, that was even going back to the Trump days or election stuff. Just tumultuous times, and that all connected.
Around 2013-14, I did an interview with the publication In These Times…about life as a working musician. I gave a very candid interview about the dualities that we face, and how artists and musicians stratify class in ways that most people in other professions don’t. Maybe in one place they’ll roll out the red carpet for you, and then in another you’re the help. So that struck a chord and a lot of people reached out to me, "like nobody ever talks about that stuff."
So that pulled me down that rabbit hole and I started to dive into the Studs Terkel [radio] archives. When I did the first performances of In These Times commissioned by the Walker Arts Center, I used a bunch of samples of different dialogue from activists and artists and that’s where the first quote from the record comes from. I like these concepts, to me, that are hard to define. Like, In these Times: Time is moving. We can talk about how everything is intense now. But that was true before. And in the future, someone else will be saying, "damn, everything is crazy in these times."
These concepts are in conversation with each other, but I feel it’s more a question than an answer. That’s what’s great about instrumental music, it doesn’t necessarily dictate literal language and though it speaks in abstracts, you can ponder it from as many angles as you want.