{"id":58668,"date":"2019-08-11T02:01:54","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T02:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58668"},"modified":"2019-08-11T02:01:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-11T02:01:54","slug":"makaya-mccraven-isnt-interested-in-saving-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58668","title":{"rendered":"Makaya McCraven Isn\u2019t Interested in Saving Jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Makaya McCraven Isn\u2019t Interested in Saving Jazz<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Rolling Stone<\/a>
\n2018-10-25<\/p>\n

Natalie Weiner<\/strong><\/a>, Reporter<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Makaya<\/a>
\nMakaya McCraven<\/a> in Chicago<\/a> in October.
\nLyndon French for RollingStone.com<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Chicago<\/a>-based drummer and bandleader on how he\u2019s marrying the energy of intimate club performances with 21st-century electronic thinking<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Is jazz<\/em> dead?\u2019 is a stupid question,\u201d says drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven<\/a> over beers at a Lower East Side<\/a> bar that is, fittingly, playing a selection of 1930s and \u201940s-era jazz cuts. \u201cIf you have to ask the same question for 50 years, it becomes a rhetorical question. When did it die?\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who know McCraven\u2019s work would likely reach a similar conclusion. Critically acclaimed releases like In the Moment<\/em> (2015) and Highly Rare<\/em> (2017) \u2014 both made up entirely of live material \u2014 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<\/a>, Kamasi Washington<\/a> and Shabaka Hutchings<\/a>, 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 \u201crevival\u201d or \u201cresurgence\u201d \u2014 a necessary spark to an otherwise moribund genre. But McCraven, 35, would prefer that listeners don\u2019t call it a comeback…<\/p>\n

..In many ways, global jazz culture is the story of McCraven\u2019s life. His father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven<\/a> \u2014 a Connecticut<\/a> native who was mentored by avant-gardists Marion Brown<\/a>, Archie Shepp<\/a>, Yusef Lateef<\/a> and Sam Rivers<\/a> \u2014 and his mother, Hungarian folk singer \u00c1gnes Zsigmondi<\/a>, met in Paris<\/a>, where McCraven was born. The family later moved to Amherst, Massachusetts<\/a>, finding an intimate artistic community in the college town…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chicago-based drummer and bandleader on how he\u2019s marrying the energy of intimate club performances with 21st-century electronic thinking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,13743,8,20],"tags":[30105,8208,30103,1392,30102,23949,30104],"class_list":["post-58668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-agnes-zsigmondi","tag-jazz","tag-makaya-mccraven","tag-music","tag-natalie-weiner","tag-rolling-stone","tag-stephen-mccraven"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58669,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668\/revisions\/58669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}