Percussionist, producer, and composer Makaya McCraven, whose album In These Times, was released a year ago last month and is currently performing music from the album on tour across the United States, has just released a video of him performing the track “This Place That Place” live at Public Records in Brooklyn ahead of the album’s release. McCraven had assembled a unique ensemble with a string quartet to perform special arrangements of songs from his new album for the Brooklyn event captured in the video by director Matthew Edginton. You can watch it here:

McCraven’s tour takes him to Madison, Iowa City, Detroit, and Toronto in the week ahead, before he heads to Brazil, Australia, and Europe. He returns to the US to perform at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on December 1 then goes to Mexico for Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky Festival. For all the details and tickets, visit makayamccraven.com.

In These Times, released on International Anthem, Nonesuch, and XL Recordings in September 2022, made several year's best album lists, including those of Pitchfork (“a high-water mark”), NPR Music's Nate Chinen (“the culmination of a years-long experiment in groove ... just might be Makaya McCraven's manifesto”), and Treble (“McCraven's masterwork”). It is the album McCraven had been trying to make since he started making records, an appropriately career-defining body of work. The eleven-song suite was created over seven-plus years, as McCraven strived to fuse odd-meter compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large-ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” he’s honed over the years. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators—including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill—In These Times highlights McCraven’s unique gift for collapsing space, destroying borders, and blending past, present, and future into poly-textural arrangements of post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st-century folk music.