When I first started to really get into music, I was very into the idea of layers. I’d listen to Fishmans’ Long Season and find myself overjoyed at each new layer laid on top of the composition. When enjoying The Avalanches’ Since I Left You I’d dig through each song to try and count how many sounds were going on at once. My maximalist listening tendencies had taught me one thing for certain: most good music, like an ogre or an onion, has layers.
Makaya McCraven’s work has layers. Two years ago, the release of his Universal Beings felt like a revelation. The drummer recorded studio collaborations with many of jazz’s biggest contemporary names and cut up the sessions into loops and samples that he sequenced with the ear of an esteemed hip-hop producer. The result is brilliant, a ninety-minute compilation of timely jazz music that runs from Shabaka Hutchings’s wild “Inner Flight” through Nubya Garcia’s heady “Voila” and on to Jeff Parker’s “Butterss’s” unfolding blissfully. The work presents listeners with as many questions as answers, as the layers of the creation process make one unsure whether any patterns in the tracks came from the studio performances or McCraven’s digital arrangements. The drummer builds compositions that add up to more than their component parts, with the obfuscated nature of their genesis only adding to their allure.
Live, McCraven is a wonderful sight. The drummer and his band command a tranquil space on stage as they recreate McCraven’s electronically generated concoctions live. As the band plays the studio songs, they improvise too, adding another layer to the depth of McCraven’s work that in many ways feels as though it could just keep iterating on itself forever, like a perfectly made terrarium growing from its own remains ad infinitum.
McCraven’s newest work finds him adding a layer onto another artist’s work. Gil Scott-Heron’s final album I’m New Here received much acclaim, but is best known to many through We’re New Here, the remix album in which Jamie xx uses the soul legend’s crooning words as sample material for his UK bass solo debut. McCraven’s We’re New Again adds yet another layer onto the seemingly never-ending album by reimagining it into a series of jazz compositions punctuated by the vocals that comprised the majority of the original. The drummer’s exquisite percussion adds a new character to the songs, making them feel simultaneously urgent and relaxed. The compositions feature the same sort of mystery as those on Universal Beings, where a listener will find themselves unsure whether portions are being played live in studio or looped by McCraven in post-production, and over it all Scott-Heron’s vocals are a grounding force of soulfulness that grants the songs an overwhelming sense of gravity. When he sings “I’ll take care of you” over McCraven’s relaxing rhythms, I can feel the love pouring through my headphones.