(Blue Note)‘Beat scientist’ McCraven balances jazz’s tradition with its future, sympathetically updating the Blue Note hard-bop 60s catalogue
Like Miles Davis, the
Chicago drummer, remix producer and “beat scientist” Makaya McCraven senses that celebrating the jazz past means sympathetic reinvention by today’s improvisers, not turning long-gone performances into set-in-stone repertory
music. Deciphering the Message, McCraven’s pithy homage to the Blue Note Records hard-bop catalogue of the 1960s, is seamlessly assembled from a mix of sampled live shows by his fine band, clips of the originals and his own hip-hop-schooled gifts for making cutting-edge beats out of almost any recorded sound.
These 13 short tracks include classics by drums legend Art Blakey, pioneering jazz-funk pianist Horace Silver and pre-Rollins tenor sax heavyweight Dexter Gordon, ingeniously stitched into what could pass as a single live show. A Slice of the Top (by saxophonist Hank Mobley, an early-Coltrane disciple with a gift for sounding impassioned without exertion) appears here over McCraven’s dark, liquid drums-and-bass shuffle – quite different from a traditionally snappy bebop groove, but the laidback horns and piano parts just happen to have been played by Mobley, Lee Morgan and McCoy Tyner. In its deep-drums reverberations, Wail Bait sounds like McCraven’s drummer-leader hero Art Blakey’s band, but navigating a morphed-Latin ebb and flow; Coppin’ the Haven (from Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up) makes the original’s languid groove less sassily hip, more silkily sensual. Autumn in
New York – a dream-walk through the chord changes when played by guitarist Kenny Burrell in 1958 – has a sharper kick in McCraven’s mingling of Joel Ross’s vibes and Burrell/Grant Green descendent Jeff Parker’s guitar.