Makaya McCraven

Last night, Jimmy’s Jazz and Blues Club in Portsmouth, New Hampshire played host to jazz drummer extraordinaire Makaya McCraven.

 

I saw McCraven a few years back at the Montreal Jazz Fest. His band at the time was a who’s who of contemporary jazz greats including Jeff Parker, Joel Ross, Junius Paul, and Marquis Hill. Each of these cats since then went on to do their own solo projects and many have played here at Jimmy’s.

 

McCraven brought a different group of talented players with him on this outing, and they didn't disappoint. The night kicked off with a slow build up to the trance-inducing track “Away” from his most recent album, Off The Record, which was released in 2025 as a combination of four separate digital EP’s before turning it into a 2-LP vinyl set.

 

From there, the ensemble made up of Matt Gold on guitar, Greg Ward on saxophone, and Christian Dillingham playing the upright bass dove straight forward into a great drum & bass groove before the sax took center stage.

 

“Improvisation is the natural state of being.” ~ Makaya McCraven

 

McCraven talked a few times in between songs to take the temperature of the audience and to address how the band creates songs through improvisation and how he digitally chops things up in the studio to bring a new element to the music. Another memorable moment was when he and the band stopped playing for about 15 seconds—a moment that felt like an eternity before he grabbed the mic and said something along the lines of, “A.I music can’t do that.”

 

Other tracks that were featured from his album Off The Record included, “Sweet Stuff” and “News Feed”.

 

For the encore, they came back on stage to do a rendition of a Hungarian lullaby that his mother used to sing to him when he was young. His version titled “Lullaby” can be heard on his 2022 album, In These Times.