Among the numerous variables on all things jazz, this year's Earshot Jazz Festival lineup features one of the prominent voices in the new Chicago scene issuing from the International Anthem label. Featuring two sets, an early and late show at Madame Lou's, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Makaya McCraven leads his band in their Seattle date on the current west coast tour. McCraven is among a 21st century body of musicians effectively "Rewriting the Rules of Jazz", who have produced bountiful collaborations and an array of top-notch albums. Most notably releases from the aforementioned International Anthem label, New York's Eremite, and the UK's scene represented by Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings have expressed new directions and a willful genre-expansive attitude to the fundamental parameters of what can be considered jazz. McCraven has been a pivotal figure in this Chicago scene since the earliest of the releases issuing from him and a set of regular collaborators heard on his "In The Moment" from 2015. Featuring nineteen rhythmic jams that were born of improvisation, this wasn't a cacophonous free jazz, but instead a new body of groove-oriented spontaneous soul jazz that was culled from 48 hours of recordings spanning 28 shows. A multitude of live chops on display alongside dense processes, synth lines, and rhythmic programming, that album acted as a foreshadowing for the more-intensive studio construction that is his debut for the legendary Blue Note label.
This meeting of a new scene and sound, with the longest running legacy in American jazz is the locus of the New York Times "Makaya McCraven Sees the Future of Jazz Through Layers of History" feature on the musician, and their wider overview, "Chicago and Jazz at Play, Ideally.". His interview for The Guardian, "‘Evolution is Part of Tradition’: Musician Makaya McCraven on the Future of Jazz" maps the last decade in which McCraven cemented his status as one of the most individual voices in contemporary jazz, pioneering his technique with a group of local collaborators to create the albums, "Universal Beings", "Highly Rare", and his astute reconfiguration of Gil-Scott Heron, "We're New Again", straddling improvisation and influences culled from neo-soul, and hip hop's mentality and approach to sample splicing. All of which became more explicit on his deeper foray in beat sciences with the "Ingenious Hard-bop Homage" of 2021's "Deciphering the Message". The album contributes another facet to McCraven's growing discography; the ability to assimilate and reconfigure some of the legendary height's of jazz past, into a liquid, changeable new form of his own making. Which is also expressed more obliquely in its immediate follow-up, the lush homage to the 1970s elegiac orchestrations of that era, what The Guardian called "A Generous Unspooling", heard on "In These Times". Four new collaborative EPs are on the horizon featuring Jeff Parker, Josh Johnson, Ben LaMar Gay, Theon Cross, and Jeremiah Chiu to be released later this year on the vanguard Nonesuch Records.
