Makaya McCraven and Gil Scott-Heron - We're New Here

The Guardian 80

(XL Recordings)
Jazz drummer and beat-maker McCraven beautifully reworks Scott-Heron’s 10-year-old album I’m New Here, resituating the poet in the improvisatory tradition

For Makaya McCraven, sampling is a means of remembrance. The Chicago-based drummer and producer has spent recent years honing his studio style to incorporate samples of his own improvised live performances, overwritten and rerecorded. The result is a series of palimpsest records: In the Moment (2015), Where We Come From (2018) and Universal Beings (2018) – all exercises in using the studio as another means of improvisation, finding difference in the repetition of the same motifs.