MAKAYA MCCRAVEN

Late show: 9:30PM - 10:50PM Under 21 must be accompanied by an adult 3108 W Cary St Richmond, VA 23221 804-918-5681 An artist who has been aptly called a “cultural synthesizer,” McCraven has a unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st century folk music. Profiled in Vice, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and NPR, among other publications, he and the music he makes today are at the very vanguard of progressive music. According to the New York Times, “McCraven has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.” After cutting his teeth in the Western Massachusetts music scene, co-founding a jazz-hip hop band called Cold Duck Complex that ultimately opened for The Pharcyde, Digable Planets, and the Wu-Tang Clan, he and his partner (now wife, comparative race studies scholar Nitasha Tamar Sharma) moved to Chicago in 2006. McCraven soon found himself immersed in both the creative and straight-ahead jazz scenes, proving his versatility, and along the way finding a community that mirrored the pulsating scene that birthed him artistically. Within five years’ time, he’d established a name for himself, gigging alongside scene stalwarts like Willie Pickens, Marquis Hill, and Jeff Parker. He first connected with the founders of Chicago’s International Anthem label in late 2011, and across 2012-2013 they hosted and recorded a series of improvised jazz nights featuring his combo at The Bedford, a club situated in what was once an old basement bank vault. McCraven took 48 hours of recordings and sculpted beguiling hip-hop beats, not unlike how Teo Macero looped and assembled Miles Davis’s On the Corner from improvised magic. At the time, McCraven thought of the project, which became the 2015 double LP release In The Moment, as an opportunity to connect and to “find a young audience in this music. It just felt like the right time and a place where I could really connect with people.” That notion proved prophetic: JazzTimes called the album “one of the year's most mesmerizing releases,” the record was an “Album of the Week'' pick by taste-making DJ Gilles Peterson on BBC radio, and it was chosen for “Best of 2015” lists by PopMatters, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times. McCraven continued to hone his process of live improvisation and sampling with Highly Rare in 2017 (crafted from a live set recorded at Danny’s Tavern in Chicago), 2018’s Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), which was built from recordings of a showcase at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, and Universal Beings (also released in 2018). Universal Beings, consisting of augmented live sessions recorded in Chicago and New York, in addition to pop-up studio sessions recorded in London and Los Angeles, concretely reflects his open communal and artistic approach. The work featured varying configurations of players, including Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings from London, Junius Paul and Tomeka Reid of Chicago, Anna Butterss and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson from Los Angeles, and Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas from New York. The title of the album was culled from a sampled passage on the track “Brighter Days Beginning,” in which percussionist Carlos Niño offers, “We’re universal beings,” a theme of borderlessness that resonated deeply with McCraven, who grew up in a multicultural household and community. “I’m not beholden to this border or this city,” McCraven told Vice in 2018, “What is a place? Other than the people. It’s just dirt, you know?” The resulting album was called “radiant” and “hypnotic” by Pitchfork. In 2019, McCraven mounted a multimedia performance of an early iteration of what would eventually become his 2022 album In These Times, at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. In the meantime, he remixed Gil Scott-Heron’s final album (2010’s I’m New Here) for 2020’s We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, issued Universal Beings E+F Sides (also in 2020), and delved into the venerable Blue Note Records catalog in 2021 for Deciphering the Message, each project also employing new improvisations and sampling, helping to further cement his “beat scientist” moniker. McCraven’s critically lauded album In These Times (released in 2022 by the three-label collaboration of International Anthem, Nonesuch, and XL Recordings) is a collection of orchestral, polytemporal progressive jazz compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as McCraven’s personal experience as a product of a multinational, working class musician community. It took McCraven 7+ years to create, as it slowly cooked in the background while his other works were released. In October 2025, McCraven released four new EPs - Techno Logic, The People’s Mixtape, Hidden Out!, and PopUp Shop - all of which are compiled on the 2xLP and 2xCD physical release Off the Record. The source material from each EP was drawn from moments of pure improvisation, r