There's a moment about four minutes into Makaya McCraven's "In These Times" where everything clicks. The drums—his drums—are having a conversation with the bass, and suddenly a horn enters like someone walking into a room mid-sentence, picking up the thread as if they'd been there all along. It's the sound of collective creation, of musicians so attuned to each other that the boundaries between composition and improvisation dissolve completely.
McCraven is doing something radical with jazz, though it doesn't announce itself as radical. He records hours of live improvisation with rotating ensembles, then takes those sessions into the studio and edits—splicing, layering, reshaping the spontaneous into something structured yet still breathing. The result feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic, like discovering that the tradition was always pointing toward this moment.
What strikes me most is the texture. Each track is dense with life—a brush on a snare here, a bass note that vibrates in your chest there, horns that seem to emerge from the fabric of the rhythm itself. This isn't background music. It demands your attention while rewarding passive listening, which is a rare balance.
The album tackles weighty themes—social justice, collective struggle, resilience—but never in a way that feels didactic. Instead, McCraven lets the music embody these ideas. The polyrhythms suggest multiplicity, different voices coexisting. The builds and releases mirror protest and rest, tension and relief. There's joy here too, unabashed and necessary.
I keep returning to that four-minute mark, to that moment of perfect convergence. It reminds me why art matters: not because it provides answers, but because it creates space for us to feel complexity, to sit with contradictions, to hear many voices at once and find the harmony they create together.
If you've been curious about contemporary jazz but intimidated by where to start, this is your entry point. And if you're a longtime listener, McCraven is pushing the conversation forward in ways that honor everything that came before.
#jazz #music #contemporaryart #creativity