About

McCraven carved out his own space in contemporary jazz on In The Moment (2015) and Universal Beings (2018), sampling his own band’s improvised sessions, then pulling, stretching, and rearranging the pieces until it shaped something new. And his stunning recreation of Gil-Scott Heron’s I’m New Here gave new context to the incendiary words of the famous poet and musician. With each subsequent project, he continues a lifelong conversation with the music that’s shaped him, leaving his own mark on it in turn.

Deciphering the Message takes it further: it blurs the line of what a “real” band is. Is it a group of people in a room, or can it stretch across time, including both the living and the dead? McCraven said he wants to introduce a new generation to these records that were foundational not only to him, but to music itself. These artists helped draft a blueprint for the way contemporary musicians improvise; soaring and swerving in and out of the pocket, yet always pulled back in by the gravitational pull of the rhythm section. With these improvised riffs, they forged building blocks for an entire wave of hip-hop—these are the records that MPC maestros like Pete Rock and DJ Premier, or Madlib and J Dilla would pick through with tweezers when making the beats that would come to define a generation. Deciphering the Message helps connect these dots. But it also plays like a fantasy come to life, a dream set at the Blue Note, with long-lost titans beaming in from the afterlife to sit in with the young blood, like proud parents watching their children surpass them. - Pitchfork