by Max Newman
On his website, Makaya McCraven refers to himself as a “Beat Scientist.” It’s an interesting moniker, but those who were present for McCraven’s performance at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, February 18 will know exactly what the spellbinding drummer was getting at. Indeed, his concert was a study of beat-making, an intersection of synthesized and organic sound, a beautiful amalgamation of the mechanical and the natural. Makaya McCraven was true to his word.
To refer to what was played by the group (McCraven on drums, Junius Paul on bass, and Marquis Hill on trumpet) as a collection of “songs” belies the fluidity of the music. It was more of a shape-shifting sonic voyage, with beautifully craggy melodies melting into one another, ear-tingling lead lines linking together via ambient moments chock-full of electronic bleeps and bloops, rhythms mutating, trailing off, and then exploding once more.
Pianist Theron Brown wants you to be able to hear his own personality in his music. “I try not to think about it too much. My music is part of me, and I try to be authentic and true to myself within it. I want people to listen and be like, ‘Oh, that’s Theron.’ It’s real, it’s honest.”
For sheer polish of performance, under the direction of Raphael Jiménez, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra is an ensemble that can scarcely be faulted. On the crisp fall evening of September 25, the Orchestra kicked off its 2025-26 season at Finney Chapel in a familiar vein: the well-rounded performance of three pieces, monumental in sound and cinematic in narrative. The Orchestra was able to simultaneously create the sensation of enormous musical objects and patchworks of delicate moments.
