. On the new record, he employed some of the same post-production techniques from those recordings, blending live improvisation with the kind of studio remixing more commonly done by a hip-hop producer than a jazz drummer.
“In These Times” is full of lush instrumentation — harps, strings and horns — all locked into heavy grooves that McCraven has whittled out of odd-meter time signatures.“This idea of marching forward through time and through challenges,” McCraven says. “I like questions, things that we ponder and think about. I’d rather it kind of be a discussion than really a prescription by me.”
The music was recorded in five different studios and multiple shows at four live performance spaces before McCraven took it back to the studio to fit everything together.A lot of the music I write, I write at the piano first,” he says. “But then also sometimes I am writing in more technological ways, where I might be sampling myself or something that happened.
As for the exotic rhythms, McCraven says he’s been exploring different grooves since his first gigs growing up in Western Massachusetts. His mother, singer Ágnes Zsigmondi, taught him folk music from her native Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe.She had a lot of music that was in ⅝, ⅞, or 9/8,” he says. “There are dances associated to those rhythms. So it was a big part of my rhythmic concept, was exploring how rhythm moves people.