Across numerous albums and mixtapes, Makaya McCraven has proven his mastery of the loop akin to hip-hop’s most celebrated beatmakers like J Dilla and Madlib. With his new remix album, Deciphering The Message, the Chicago-based drummer and producer digs through the Blue Note Records vaults.

Makaya McCraven is no stranger to reimagining the work of others in his own image; after all, he released a brilliant rendition of Gil Scott-Heron’s We’re New Again in 2020. But for McCraven, a Chicago-raised drummer, producer, and modern jazz touchstone, Deciphering the Message was a different beast altogether. The famed Blue Note Records imprint threw open its archives to McCraven, allowing him to use the music of the label as the foundation for his new album.

To begin the project, McCraven dug through records to familiarize himself with all the hidden crevices of Blue Note’s history. “I wanted to have that digging experience, like a crate digger looking for hip-hop samples,” McCraven explains. “I have a lot of things started, a lot of sketches, a lot of tracks finished that aren’t on the record – just a massive amount of material.”

Listen to Makaya McCraven’s Deciphering The Message now.

McCraven treated pre-production as a solitary exercise, picking out bits and pieces of original recordings he was attracted to. He wanted to make the album without stems, so the project is sampled exclusively from full-band recordings. “I was searching, trying to make my connections in an organic way. I was deciphering the material as I went along,” he says.

Once these original sketches were solidified, McCraven sent the songs to trusty collaborators like Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Marquis Hill, and more, asking the artists to record parts over his outlines. Once they were done, he took the material back again, chopping and arranging the added sections.

The result is a sprawling love letter to the history of jazz, but one rewritten in the language of modern hip-hop and R&B production. It’s an alternate reality in which the past and present join together in communion, celebrating one of the richest archives in the history of modern music. To celebrate the release of Deciphering the Message, we asked McCraven to break down the process behind five of the album’s songs.

“Autumn In New York (AKA Spring In Chicago),” (Blue Lights, Vol.1 by Kenny Burrell)
The first thing that caught me about this track was just the intro and guitar. I found that, and I started to loop it up and start rearranging some of the changes and the melodies from the A section and the theme. Once it started to settle into a space, the next thing I started doing was some overdubs, and played some bass, and some keyboards, and kept adding different elements.

From there, I started sending the track to people, and getting a take. As people send me material, then I’m going to go in there and continue to restructure it until I feel like I have a nice piece from start to finish, with a whole direction. But it was really the intro, just the way that Kenny articulates the melody, that came across and was the bedrock of the piece. I had a strong melody and form to extrapolate from with other musicians.