Name: Makaya McCraven
Start: 2026-03-01T21:00:00-05:00
Location: 619 South Main Street, Gainesville, FL, United States, Florida 32601

Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven is a prolific drummer, composer, and producer whose boundary-defying work has placed him at the forefront of modern improvised music. Described by the New York Times as “one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality,” McCraven has built an internationally acclaimed body of work that blurs the lines between jazz, hip-hop, and global folk traditions.

Born in Paris in 1983 to Hungarian singer Ágnes Zsigmondi and American jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, he was raised in a multicultural community in Massachusetts where he absorbed influences ranging from African Gnawa rhythms to Eastern European folk music—formative experiences that shaped his view of jazz as people’s music.

His innovative process of transforming live improvisations into intricately layered, sample-based compositions has defined a series of breakthrough releases on Chicago’s International Anthem label, including In the Moment (2015), Universal Beings (2018), and his latest opus, In These Times (2022)—a project more than seven years in the making that encapsulates his artistic evolution and vision of borderless, post-genre sound. Often called a “cultural synthesizer,” McCraven sees his work as a continuation of living musical traditions, rooted in the body and the community while pushing boldly into the future—a reflection, as he puts it, of being “well-rooted, but walking into the future.”